


To Call the Darkness Home

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark, Gen, Horror, M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-28 20:52:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last thing Raylan ever wanted was to go back to Kentucky, where Boyd Crowder was carving crosses into his hands and what was down in the coal mines never did close its eyes to sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. we ran out of hell together

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to norgbelulah for talking me through this for almost a year and having unlimited patience and good suggestions and to Thornfield Girl for her awesome willingness to read through it all at the end and double all the amazing suggestions and comments. You two are the best.
> 
> Some early lines in this taken from the pilot.
> 
> \--
> 
> ETA, 2016: [I left the original note in Chapter 14 just to preserve it. It used to be duplicated here. It's a little more freaked out about unconscious influence.] I talked to people back when I was writing/posting this about how the shadow of Stephen King's _It_ \--and maybe _Desperation_ \--was on this and how I mostly hadn't realized it when I was writing it, even though I love that novel and King's work generally. In retrospect--and having revisited the book since--I see more parallels than I'd intended or previously recognized in the tropes and structures, so I want to correct my past self as best I can and make it clear up front that this stands as an unconscious but nonetheless loving homage to _It_ and to the guy who may not have originated creepy small towns possessed by nameless evil, but who certainly perfected them. Here's to Stephen King.

**i. we ran out of hell together**

Raylan’s flight back to Kentucky ran into a pocket of turbulence that made him hold onto his drink a little tighter. The old lady in the next seat took his other hand. She had glasses that she wore on a chain and a special zippered photo-keeper, twice as thick as a wallet, filled with pictures of her grandchildren, all three of whom played soccer and T-ball and had hair like her son’s, their daddy’s. And if the plane had crashed before it ever touched down in Lexington, killing this nice old woman and everyone else on board, Raylan would still have been happier than he’d be if it landed and he had to put his boots down once more on Kentucky soil.

They passed out of the storm and into the light again.

And just like that, he was home.

*

There’d been a time in his life when Lexington was far enough away from Harlan.

The first time Raylan had made it there, he was nineteen, and still turning up pockets of coal-dust from the creases in his clothing; he’d slept in a homeless shelter with his hundred dollars stuck inside his socks and sweaty against the soles of his feet until he could get enough work washing dishes and busing tables to pay for a shitty little hotel room with roaches that skittered across the bathroom tiles every time he turned on the light. He clawed his way up into the real world of real things a little at a time, and he sweat blood doing it, but he never once thought that Lexington was too close to Harlan to be safe. The city felt just as pure and good as sunlight on the skin. After a time, even the nightmares stopped, and he started bitching like an ordinary person about the low pay and the roaches, exactly as if Lexington hadn’t been his longed-for salvation.

But there must have been some uneasiness in him that he just hadn’t paid any mind, because every time he had left, he had gone farther and farther away, until he had threatened to run right off the coast into the Atlantic.

Now—goddamn Tommy Bucks and his own itchiness, his goddamn fucking temper—he was back.

The motel this time around didn’t have roaches that he noticed, but the light in the closet was busted. It wasn’t the bulb, just plain bad wiring. It wasn’t a fixable thing—not without such tampering on his part as would draw questions—and so Raylan settled for propping the door open with a chair. He didn’t like the idea of the darkness inside being left to fester.

Because, as it turned out, Lexington wasn’t so far from Harlan after all.

*

Raylan waited until morning to get to the office. It was another one of those things he’d forgotten—how to dislike the way the shadows crawled across the world and smothered it after sundown. He’d have to get over that enough to hide it, eventually, but for now he could just pretend that he’d come in yesterday all cotton-headed from jet lag and slept it off, all the better for his fresh start.

“I think I’d rather you didn’t put it that way,” Art said, after they’d shaken hands and done their catching up. “A fresh start’s an awfully dramatic thing to be making, and I have enough shit to deal with as it is.”

“I won’t give you any trouble,” Raylan said. “Not my intention to, anyway.” The quieter he kept his life in Kentucky, the sooner he could leave it. Outside of Tommy Bucks, his record didn’t have so much blood on it that a little penance done wouldn’t have a chance of earning him back out of the state again. “I’ve had enough trouble for one lifetime, and all I want now’s a chance to put my head down and do a little work.”

Art snorted. “Guess they really whipped your ass back in Miami, didn’t they? I never thought I’d live to see Raylan Givens looking so contrite.”

Raylan’s smile felt thin. “Like I said. Fresh start.”

“You aren’t thinking of a fresh start with Winona? You know she’s still with that realtor of hers, one she left you for.”

Winona was another stretch of quicksand in his head that would suck his feet out from underneath him if he came too close—no, he wasn’t interested in a fresh start there at all. Winona hadn’t left him for a realtor—some Guy Smiley named Gary Hawkins, with a slightly damp handshake—so much as she had left him for a man who could talk about where he’d come from without waking up screaming three nights in a row, after. She’d said Raylan was angry, scared, and secretive, and she’d been right on all three counts, or at least enough that he couldn’t argue with her.

When he’d heard she was headed back to Kentucky, to keep an eye on her mother in the last drawn-out stages of her cancer, he first called—six times—and then showed up on her doorstep after a long night’s drive to ask her to please stay the hell out of Kentucky.

She’d slammed the door in his face only to open it again just a second later: “I won’t go home, Raylan,” she’d said, as brave and as beautiful as he had ever seen her. “I promise I won’t. I swear to God, I will let my mother die alone with her nurses and I won’t even make it back for the funeral. I will do that for you, if you will please just, for the love of God, get some help. There’s something _wrong_ with you.” Tears had been standing out in her eyes, as bright as stars, and all Raylan had been able to say was, “You don’t know that place like I do.”

Winona had gone back.

And in the end, so had he. He didn’t have any illusions that she’d want to see him. He’d worn out whatever love she had for him. All he would do was track mud into her new life.

And if Art had talked to her, then she was in Lexington, and Lexington was—despite what he felt along the back of his neck—far enough away from Harlan, at least for someone who had never been. It was. It had to be.

Art snapped his fingers. “That jet lag still got your head a few miles back?”

“Memory lane,” Raylan said. He shrugged. “Mine’s not anywhere you’d want to buy a house. I got no interest in rekindling things with Winona. She’s welcome to Gary.”

“I never did meet a man who took divorce from that kind of woman half so well as you have.”

“We had our differences, is all. It’s best ended.”

“So you know, all that sublimated emotion’s what led you to shooting a man over his crab puffs.” Fortunately for Raylan, Art was the kind of man whose prying was limited by how little he really wanted to know whatever it was he was on the trail of, and he wasn’t so interested in Raylan’s failed marriage that he’d put his nose to the ground for it. He picked up a file instead. “You grew up out there in Harlan, right?” He ignored Raylan’s silence. “Thought you were from there. Reason I asked was there’s this guy we’ve been looking into, about your age, and it’s a small town. He seems the kind of have made an impression, thought you might know him. Boyd Crowder.”

Raylan’s mouth went numb, like anything he’d be getting out of it would just be noise.

“I’d say you do know him. Unless you’ve changed enough that you come over like a deer in headlights just for strangers.”

Raylan found his tongue. “He stayed? Boyd stayed in Harlan?”

“Well, he took a tour in Desert Storm, but he came back home again after. Been there ever since, except for a little stretch in Alderson for tax evasion. They didn’t keep him long, though. The two you grow up together?”

“Boyd and I dug coal together when we were nineteen,” Raylan said. He looked down at his hands, as if he thought he’d still see some of the dust caked underneath his nails. They were clean. They’d been that way ever since his first trip to Lexington, when he’d scoured them with soap in the plastic laundry sink at the shelter, and run a bristle-brush around them until he bled. Then he’d worried about the blood running through the drain and down into the pipes, into the dark, maybe going all the way back home. “Art, if I’m gonna tell you even a third of this story, I’m going to need a drink.”

They went to a bar that was dark enough to make Raylan nervous. He drank a little faster to kill it. He’d spent a long time being a man who was cool in any situation, because compared to Harlan, what the fuck was there to be afraid of? He had to remember who he was.

Art, who’d known him in better times and places, was looking at him with more attention than Raylan liked. “So now you’ve had your drink.”

He could have a hundred and it wouldn’t make any difference. Anyway, he’d been full of shit before—Art wasn’t getting even a third of this particular story, no matter how drunk Raylan got. Some things it just didn’t pay to tell.

“Boyd and I dug coal together,” he said again. It seemed like the only way to start the story. “We started off just working with picks, but Boyd, he had a younger brother, Bowman, and nothing would do but that Bowman wouldn’t have to go in the mines, so Boyd took a promotion, started working as a powder-man.” He remembered the way Boyd would grin at him in the darkness, which hadn’t seemed so bad then, just before he disappeared down the shaft. “He’d go down alone with his Emulex 520, come out stringing wire, call out ‘fire in the hole’ to clear the shaft. He’d blow and we’d go back in and dig out the pieces. We weren’t what you’d call buddies—” It wasn’t so good that the lying was starting this soon, it would mean keeping a close eye on himself and making sure he didn’t slip up. “—but you work a deep mine with a man, you look out for each other.”

Raylan was never above scratching at himself when there was nothing else to make him bleed, but it had been a long time since he’d brought up Boyd Crowder to do it. He’d tried to forget Boyd. Boyd was too sharp a knife for him to use against himself and not feel the cut.

He ran his thumb along the wet side of his glass and listened to the little squeak of it. “They, ah, they dug too deep one day. They’d done it before. There are cracks all over the hollers that have collapsed in on themselves and the men in them, and they puff up coal dust and God knows what when they do. Bits of bone, I expect. From all the people inside. Anyhow, it was unstable. The company had maybe known for a while that it was unstable, maybe not. I don’t recall it was ever proved one way or the other. But the walls and the ceiling all started coming down around us, and Boyd, he grabbed my hand and pulled me out when I was too shit-scared to move. We ran out of hell together.

“So when the mine opened up again, I didn’t much want to be anywhere near it, and I didn’t want Boyd there either, on account of him having saved my life and all, but he said he couldn’t quit, because of Bowman.” He looked at Art. “Bowman was a star runningback in high school, and Boyd was always saying he had the goods to go pro. I never did see his name anywhere when I was out in the world, so I guess he figured wrong.”

He must have stopped for longer than he’d known, because then Art was prompting him, “Boyd didn’t want to quit because of Bowman…” and there was another drink in front of him that he didn’t remember ordering. He drank it anyway.

“Between Bo—that was Boyd’s daddy—” and a meaner son-of-a-bitch Raylan had never known, outside his own family tree “—and Boyd, working in the mines, they about could scrape by without Bowman bringing in any income. But not if Boyd quit.” There was nothing left in his glass. He settled for gripping it so hard his fingers ached to the bone. “So I left Harlan without Boyd, ran off here. I never thought I’d see him again.”

“Raylan,” Art said, “you’ll forgive me for saying so, but that doesn’t seem like the kind of story a man has to get himself liquored up to tell.”

No, it didn’t, and that was because it was weak tea, so watered down that there wasn’t hardly anything left of the truth. He shrugged. “I never felt right about leaving Boyd behind. He saved my life, and in the end, when we were both treading water out in the deep, I kicked him away and left him to drown. Wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“Well, you’re a good man, Raylan. Some people just don’t get saved, that’s all. And Boyd—from what I’m seeing here, even if you had left Harlan together, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. This isn’t typical small town bullshit unhappiness, some guy stuck in his life and drinking a little too much, maybe smacking his wife and kids around because of it, your usual sum-bitch routine. Boyd Crowder isn’t playing with a full deck. In fact, I’d say right now, you gave him one, he’d scrape the shit off the backs and use it to blow something up.” He passed Raylan the file. “I’m guessing he’s changed a bit from what you remember.”

There were close-ups as well as the line-up shot. Raylan didn’t want to look, but he did anyway. “The hands are new. And he’s lost some hair.”

“Well,” Art said, “who the hell hasn’t?”

“Why’d he do that to his hands, you think?”

“Who knows? We got that one from the hospital, and Boyd told them it was a religious ritual.”

They were crosses, one right-side up and one upside-down, carved deep into the skin. It must have hurt like hell.

“Boyd never had much in the way of religion that I recall.”

“He said it was to ward off demons, and then he said that what he really meant was monsters, and things that didn’t have any kind of name, but God would protect him if he gave himself over. Scared the shit out of the nurses, too, let me tell you. We’ve been keeping an eye on him ever since. Local law enforcement passes anything along to us, since we’re taking an interest on account of how federal fugitives flock to Boyd Crowder like flies to a honeypot. Insanity does have its sparkle for those on the other side of the law.”

Raylan thought that it wasn’t the insanity, not really. It was Boyd, who’d always had a kind of electricity thrumming beneath his skin. People had listened to him.

“Anyway,” Art went on, “Boyd’s a suspect for shooting a man named Jared Hale last night out on Tate’s Creek Road, on the bridge. Known associates—the aforementioned insanity effect—and it does have that inimitable Crowder ring to it. But you’ll see that when you get the coroner’s report, which you’ll do when you get back to the office.”

Raylan turned the photos to the side to get a better look. “He really said he did that to keep away monsters?”

“To protect himself from being used by monsters for ill works. It’s all there.”

“Huh,” Raylan said. “He happen to mention if he thought it worked?”


	2. the kind of man he'd be proud to be

**ii. the kind of man he’d be proud to be**  
  
  
Rachel Brooks had the coroner’s report on his desk when he got back.  “That’s borrowed,” she said, her first words to him after, “I’m Rachel Brooks.”  
  
“I can’t keep the paper?”  
  
She smiled.  “The paper you can keep.  Just not the case.  Don’t go chasing after anyone because of it.  We’re working share and share alike on this one.”  
  
“Oh,” Raylan said.  “I see I have a reputation.”  
  
“That’s a thing shooting people gets you.”  
  
“Or screwing ‘em, if you’re of a kinder frame of mind.”  That was the other one.  He held out his hand.  “Tim Gutterson.”  
  
“Art never was much for introductions.”  
  
“Well,” Tim said, “me and Rachel, we’re so pretty he forgets we aren’t just here to be decorative.  You’re working Crowder?”  
  
“And I can’t shoot him,” Raylan said.  “It’s been made clear.”  
  
“Yeah,” Tim said, “they don’t let me shoot anyone either.”  
  
“Tim was a sniper in the Rangers,” Rachel said.  “He’s always longing for a hostage situation.”  
  
“But you’re more sensible.”  
  
She smiled again.  “No.  Just better at pretending.”  
  
There were canaries that they used to send down into coal mines, a long time ago.  They would lock those bright birds in cages and carry them down.  If there were leaks, and the gas could kill, it would be the canary that went first.  Raylan’s daddy had told him about the canaries when he was real little, and Raylan had thought, then, that the canaries died first, in the mines, because they were the brightest things down there.  They were all the color in the world.  They were innocent.  He’d understood it to be that the miners sacrificed those birds so they could keep breathing, and that with some other kind of animal, less friendly, less bright, less likely to sing, it wouldn’t have worked.  Of course he’d later understood that he’d gotten the wrong end of the thing, but he still remembered it from time to time.  The mistakes you made as a kid stuck with you.  Those self-invented interpretations always felt somehow more accurate than the truth.  
  
And there in Lexington, liking Rachel and Tim already, Raylan thought two things at the same time, braided together like a coil:  
  
 _I could be happy here._  
  
and  
  
 _They’re the canaries in the coal mine._  
  
“I should pretend to be working,” he said, and gestured with the file.  
  
“Don’t shoot Boyd Crowder,” Tim said.  
  
“Believe me,” Raylan said, “I have no intentions on that score.”  
  
Left alone, he had nothing to resort to but the file itself, and whatever way Jared Hale had gone and died in that made Art think Boyd must’ve been tangled up in it somehow.  
  
 _That inimitable Crowder ring to it._  
  
Looking at it, Raylan was just as glad that he’d stayed in the night before and not been there to see the way Jared’s skull had caved in like a rotten pumpkin that met with a boot.  Blood and brain matter, in little twists of gray and pink, spattered all over the inside of his windshield.  But although most of the dead he’d seen was his own, he’d still seen worse than that—there was Nicaragua, anyway—and what he had seen in Harlan, towards the end.  
  
There was more to Jared Hale, though: it wasn’t how he had died but what had happened to him afterwards that had aroused Art’s suspicions, probably, unless criminals had fallen so low in recent times that Boyd was the only who knew how to put a bullet smoothly into a man’s brain.  He may have been the only one to score crosses into a man’s skin, though—all with the deep-but-pale look of cuts done post-mortem, as confirmed by the report in his hands—and lash a silver coil of wire around his throat to stick what was left of his head back against the seat.  
  
Raylan touched the photos lightly.   _You left him over running water, Boyd._  Raylan had never held to the idea that that would help much, not when most of the creeks were polluted with slag from the mines, but he supposed it couldn’t hurt.  
  
If he arrested Boyd for the murder of Jared Hale, he would get Boyd out of Harlan’s teeth once and for all.  Strange to think that sending a man away to prison for the rest of his life might be a kindness to him, a way to approximate repayment for that debt he’d taken a long time ago.  
  
He headed into Art’s office.  “I agree it fits with what we know of him.”  
  
“Great.  Then take a run out to Harlan and see if you can find him.  He’s got no address on record, but I’d suggest looking in at his brother’s house—”  
  
Raylan froze.  “Rachel said I wasn’t gonna be chasing anyone.”  
  
“Well, I’d like to keep your trigger finger as far away from any potential complications as I can, but the locals have already tried for Boyd and come up empty.  Talked to them just now.  They said if we want him, we can have him.  I want him.  Now, he and his brother aren’t what you’d call close—haven’t been for years—but family’s family, and he might know where we could lay hands on Boyd.  Maybe he’ll tell you.  You were friends with Boyd.”  
  
“But not Bowman.  We never did see eye-to-eye.”  
  
“Then you’ll welcome the chance to scrape your shoes across his floor a little and look repentant for all your wrongs.  I don’t much care how you get him to talk to you, Raylan, but I’ll be damned if I let you get away with not trying when you’re the only one with a chance of making a collar on Boyd.”  
  
“Art,” he said.  “Art.  I can’t go to Harlan.”  His skin was filmed all of a sudden with a cool and prickly sweat.  What formed in his mouth was _send Tim or Rachel_ , but, thank God, he was still enough of a man not to say it.  He wasn’t nineteen anymore, to give a lamb over to the slaughter just to save himself.  “I could call Bowman from here, get him to come in, or send Boyd.  He could do that, maybe.  He’s just as likely to do it over the phone as he is in person.”  That was a long ways away from being true—a person could hang up a phone a hell of a lot easier than he could slam a door in a lawman’s face, and they both knew it.  
  
It was a long time ago, since he’d buried the boy he’d been, but he could feel that younger Raylan, the coward, starting to reach up through the dirt, showing the white tips of his fingers with the coal dust under the nails.  He wondered if Art could see him, too, or if he were taking all this foot-dragging for pure laziness and contrariness.  One might not be better than the other.  He wasn’t sure he’d rather be an asshole than spineless.  
  
Art seemed content to give him a little slack, though.  Probably he thought Raylan was still feeling the effect of the bar, but all the good parts of being a little buzzed had drained out of him a while back now, in truth.  
  
“Bowman Crowder hasn’t paid his phone bill in years.  His wife tried to use it to call the police on him, and he took a dislike to it.”  Art grimaced.  “You see how much I know about these people that I don’t want to?  I’m just as happy to hand over all that to you.  You can handle Bowman.  Boyd, too.”  
  
“I can handle him right into a courtroom, if need be,” Raylan said steadily, “but I can do that without stepping foot in Harlan.”  
  
“All right,” Art said.  “You tell me how you propose to find a man who never leaves Harlan ‘less he’s dragged out in cuffs without _going_ to Harlan, and I’ll just sit here and drink my coffee.”  
  
He had nothing, of course, and Art knew it.  Asshole was out, and he was left with coward, and he found that he didn’t want that, even if not taking it got him killed.  He didn’t want to have Art know that that was who he’d been, either.  
  
“Have a nice trip,” Art said.  
  
*  
  
Raylan made it halfway to Harlan before he started up the old familiar refrain.  
  
 _You were a kid the last time you were there, you and Boyd both, and whatever you thought you saw, it could have just been imaginings._  
  
Nineteen was a little old to let his head get overruled by fantasy like that, but then, he’d been unhappy, Arlo laying his fists and his belt into him every time he turned around, and he’d relied on Boyd to take him out of himself.  If Boyd had always been unsettled—  
  
He pulled the car over to the side of the road so sharply and carelessly that the right front tire dropped off a little into the grass.  He put his head down against the steering wheel.  He wasn’t going to do what he was doing.  
  
He could lie to himself all he liked about what had happened in Harlan when he was nineteen, and what he thought had been happening there forever, but he would not cast himself and Boyd in some fucking homophobic afterschool special where all of this was nothing more than Boyd leading him down the path.  He’d done enough in that direction already.  
  
He wasn’t going to be weak anymore.  If he had to go back to Harlan, being weak wouldn’t do him any good at all.  He’d thought that weakness had gotten him out, but Harlan had always been waiting for him.  
  
If he was going to die there, he wanted to die as the kind of man he’d be proud to be.  
  
Still, he took a paperclip from the file he’d brought with him, unfolded it until it was straight, and scratched crosses into his wrists, where the cuffs would hide them from sight.  He had the feeling that it wasn’t enough of a sacrifice to appease, but hell, if he didn’t die, he’d have to go back to Lexington, and he didn’t want to explain to Art and Tim and Rachel, all so wide-eyed and innocent, why he’d opened his hands to the bone, like Boyd had, just to carve some protection into his skin.  
  
“All right,” he said.  His voice didn’t shake.  “What the hell.”  
  
And he drove into Harlan.  
  
Didn’t even pull off again to throw up, either.


	3. the world ought to burn you a little

**iii. the world ought to burn you a little**

 

Raylan hadn’t liked Bowman Crowder when he’d met him the first time, and he didn’t improve on a longer acquaintance.

He’d thickened out and gotten a beer belly over the muscle that was still hard underneath. It was what you might call a metaphor—whatever Bowman might look like, way down below the surface, he was trouble. And he was trouble with no liking for Raylan at all. He wouldn’t even open the door all the way. Fortunately, Raylan had no objection to cooling his heels on the porch. He had the feeling that there was nothing inside Bowman Crowder’s house he much wanted to see. There was the sound of flies buzzing somewhere deep in the back.

There had been flies in the mine, the day of the cave-in. Raylan had been the first to notice the sound of them underneath the equipment hum, and he’d said, “Boyd, listen,” and Boyd had, his head tilted so that the one pale spot of his cheek where the dust hadn’t gone, or where he’d sweated through it, gleamed in the low lamplight. He’d heard them, too, but no one else had. Then afterwards, when they had run up through the dust and the noise breaking behind them like a wave, Boyd had said, “My God, Raylan,” and he’d turned dead flies, black and green and violet, out of Raylan’s clothes and hair. Then, “Hold real still,” and he’d brushed one away from the corner of Raylan’s eye, where it had been tangled in his lashes. Boyd was studded with them, too, and Raylan’s fingers had been shaking as he’d picked them away.

But that had been a long time ago, when he’d been just a boy, and now he wasn’t much on letting his hands shake.

“Raylan Givens,” Bowman said flatly.

Raylan touched the brim of his hat. “Bowman.”

 _If you have the hope of intimidating me, keeping me out like this, you should know that me being here at all means I’m way past being scared of whatever you have to offer._ He smiled. Bowman didn’t. Well, Raylan could be friendly all on his own.

“I imagine you’re looking for Boyd.”

“You imagine correctly.”

“Well, we wouldn’t know where he’s gotten himself off to. He hasn’t come around since the last time he tried to light the house on fire, and that was six months back.”

“Boyd tried to set your house on fire. And more than once.”

“Shit, yeah. Made like he was going to blow it up twice, too. Asshole’s crazy as a loon.”

Raylan smiled. “Bowman,” he said. “This is the kind of thing that I’m going to say, and I’m only going to say once. I ain’t the man you want to insult your brother to.”

Bowman spat tobacco just a little ways from Raylan’s boots. They were still fairly new, so he would’ve minded if it had struck. They would have had a go right there, most likely—though it may have been that he just wanted an excuse to see if he could beat the living shit out of Bowman Crowder. Was that history or Harlan? _Probably both._

“My brother says you saved his soul. Funny how that isn’t the way I remember it. Then again, he always was sweet on you.”

“And you,” Raylan said calmly. “Always talking about how you were going to set the world on fire. Have to say I’m glad he’s come around to thinking the world ought to burn you a little instead. Guess he was mistaken in his opinions of us both. You’re sure you’ve no notion where he might be? Answer’s still no, I might have to keep stopping by, reflecting on the beauty of the sunset from your porch. I’m not plagued with any other occupation at the moment.”

Bowman stared at him for a moment and then spat again. “Ava might know.” Raylan didn’t have much time to think that one over before Bowman turned to bellow, “ _AVA_!” through the house. Soon enough, there were footsteps, light and hurried as a mouse’s, and there was Ava standing right smack in front of him, almost as much a ghost as Boyd would have been. She looked about the way she had at sixteen, to him, only most of the light had gone out of her face, and she seemed tired. Well, a lifetime of living with Bowman Crowder would do that to a person, most likely. Maybe it had done the same for Boyd, when he had realized that whatever he gave up, his little brother was never making it out Harlan, and was an asshole besides.

It might not be right to blame all the ills of the world on Bowman Crowder, but he did think he’d be happier for it.

“Raylan,” she said. Her fingers skimmed lightly over her hair. It wasn’t out of place, not that he would have minded it so.

He nodded. “Ava.”

Bowman put his hand on her shoulder. It didn’t look right there. Then again, Raylan himself was tall but lean enough that he’d always had a mistrust of people built as solid as Bowman or his own father. It was unfair, he knew—Art was that way, and more teddy bear than grizzly—but there was an implacability to the look of men like that, and an easy potential for hurt or intimidation, by sheer playground bullying virtue of I _’m bigger than you_. He didn’t doubt that Bowman was the kind of man to avail himself of that natural advantage.

“Raylan’s a U. S. Marshal. He’s looking for Boyd.”

Ava licked her lips. “Why?”

“Dammit, woman, why’s it matter why? If he told you something about where he’s shacked up these days, just tell the man and get him off our porch.”

“I wouldn’t mind talking to Ava alone,” Raylan said. “If that’s all right with you, Ava.” He knew better than to ask if it were all right with Bowman, not that he would have been inclined to it anyhow. If Bowman were inclined to try to stop her, Raylan could get himself involved in the situation with no trouble at all.

Of course, Ava herself could always say no, trusting that Bowman would lay hands on her if she said yes, and she did look like she’d lost her spark a bit in times since—

But she nodded and slipped past Bowman. She _was_ a ghost, he thought, looking at the paleness of her, and the way she moved in those little darting motions that suggested a deer-like sensitivity to danger, but also a divorce from the ordinary way of doing things, the usual carelessness of a body dealing with itself. Ava Crowder was a woman conscious of her skin. She crossed the porch with him and went down to where he’d parked his car street-side, like it was nothing at all: she was barefoot in the dust and grass of the front yard, a little overgrown and weedy. The dandelions and long grass brushed against her ankles. She said, “You really came back.”

“I really did.”

“Why?”

“Got sent. I was careless.” He glanced up at the porch where Bowman still stood in the doorway, his arms wrapped around himself, hamhock-hands thick and pink and clenched. “Ava, I don’t suppose I need to tell you that Bowman isn’t the kind of man—”

“Boyd’s living in a church,” she said. “I can show you where, but only if you take me with you, and right now. There’s nothing back in that house I want to take with me. Just let’s get in your car and go.” Her neck was rigid—not as if she wouldn’t turn her head back to look at Bowman but as if she couldn’t. She would never get it loose enough.

“Ava,” he said, “you want to leave, I’ll take you, but I ain’t in the business of kidnapping. You think you’re liable to change your mind halfway through, decide Bowman’s the love of your life after all?”

“I haven’t loved Bowman in years,” she said. “He beats the shit out of me. Why do you think Boyd keeps trying to burn the house down?” She smiled. Fire was as good a memory as any to keep you warm, Raylan supposed. “Boyd says that Bowman turned into a monster. That underneath his skin, he’s all just shadows and worms strung together with a little bit of gristle? Boyd _is_ crazy, you know. Bowman’s just a man. Not much of one, but a man all the same.”

“But you know where Boyd is,” Raylan said.

“Abandoned church, I told you. You know he carved crosses into his hands?”

“I’ve seen the pictures.”

“Pictures don’t do them justice. Are you going to take me away or not?”

“I am,” Raylan said. “You’ll allow me one more question first, though?”

“If you’ll ask it quick.”

“Why change? The woman on the porch wouldn’t have asked me for a white horse. You’ve stayed with Bowman years. You can’t have just been hoping all the while I’d show up and save you.”

“I tell you,” Ava said, “you’ll think I’m lying. Or else crazy, like Boyd.” By now the wind really had disarrayed her hair a little, and she brushed back a few tendrils of it.

Dislodged, something grazed against her hand. She didn’t seem to notice. When she let go and her hair whisked up again, the little black spot fell away, and Raylan saw that it was a fly. Its wings were brittle enough that they broke away in the wind.

He didn’t even question that he could see that, that something so small would loom so large to him—towards the end of his time in Harlan, he and Boyd had been seeing a lot of impossible things. That was his homecoming, there, as much as the turbulence on the flight had been, the broken light in his closet, the drink in the bar that he didn’t remember ordering. Come to that, Boyd shooting Jared Hale in the back of the head Raylan’s first night back in Kentucky. Whatever it was, it had more fingers than he’d expected, and more reach, too.

Chills ran along his spine. What if he’d shot Tommy Bucks— _found_ Tommy Bucks—all so he could come back here? Stand in this tall grass with Ava Crowder and watch her brush a dead fly from her hair? It was still only the beginning of the thing.

The beginning again of it, anyway, since for him it had started twenty years ago, and who knows how the fuck long it had been going on before he’d realized.

The backs of his wrists itched and burned him where he’d carved his crosses in.

He said to Ava, “I don’t think I’m much inclined these days to disbelief.”

“It’s that house,” she said. “I can’t think in there. I sit around and it’s like my head fills up with dust.” She gave him another smile, pretty as the first, but enough for him to remember why he had thought she seemed like a ghost. “Once, I tried to kill him. I loaded up his shotgun and I took it in to where he was eating supper. I still couldn’t see straight always from him knocking my head against the stove—I’d said I wished Boyd would burn the house down, get us out of it, and he didn’t like that none. I pointed it at him, and he said what I was doing with it, and I said I was going to shoot him. And I raised it—woke up a little while later on the kitchen floor, with the flies buzzing around my mouth. Can’t ever keep them out of the house. I buy those glue strips, you know, but they never do get stuck. And Bowman eating sweet potatoes like nothing had happened, his shotgun back where he’d left it. He didn’t even know I was there till I stood up, and then he just—laughed at me.”

“He didn’t remember you coming in.”

“I don’t know that I did come in, except there I was. And you think, well, you hit your head, you were confused, but I wasn’t confused. I never wanted anything so clear in my life.” She looked him over. “You believe me?”

“I believe you,” Raylan said.

“I start in about the house, Bowman says I’m as crazy as his brother.”

“You’re not crazy, and I’m not sure Boyd is, either.”

She had as dry a laugh as he’d ever heard. “Boyd says that Harlan’s poisoned all through, that it isn’t safe for people to be here, but we don’t leave because it won’t let us. Boyd says he sees spiders in Bowman’s eyes sometimes. Boyd says—Boyd says you’re an angel gonna save us all. Will you save me, at least? Take me away from all this?”

“Well,” Raylan said, “I’ll take you away.” He didn’t have a theory yet as to how far they could get, but he could start driving, anyway.


	4. more scar tissue than skin

**iv. more scar tissue than skin**

 

Boyd’s church was at least a mile away from anything anyone would want to visit. It seemed a strange place to set up shop, but Raylan imagined that churches, especially in Harlan, rooted where they would, and grew or died there for reasons not especially tied to location. This one had died, unless he took Boyd as a sign of life, and he wasn’t sure he could. There were trucks rusting on the lawn. They all had crosses painted on their hoods—some in whitewash and some in a darker shade that Raylan didn’t want to consider for too long. He touched one of them at the headlight as he went by, though. He had the feeling they were guard-dogs that deserved a pat.

Ava was still by his side. Bowman hadn’t chased them, which Raylan had found surprising but Ava had taken as natural. “He won’t go running after,” she’d said, her eyes on nothing but the road ahead of them. “If he can, he’ll kill me for leaving him. He said once he’d make me disappear off the face of the earth if I left him. But he won’t run. If he could run after me, he’d be a different kind of man.”

Raylan saw the truth in that. Whatever Boyd had said about seeing spiders in his brother’s eyes, Raylan had always just seen meanness there. Meanness, and a willingness to take advantage. No special courage or will, though, to hold his feet to the fire until he would move. He would be coming for Ava, but in his own time and way. In the meantime, if she couldn’t be bothered about it, neither could he: Lord knew the both of them had bigger problems than Bowman Crowder. He’d counted sixteen flies crawling sluggishly across the floor and windows of his car before he’d pulled it onto the church lawn.

He took Ava’s hand. He wasn’t sure why. “Boyd likely to spook, you think?”

“Boyd spooks if the wind turns.” She felt along his hand. “You’re bleeding.”

“I expect so.” The crosses at his wrists hadn’t stopped itching until he’d left the Crowder yard, and he’d noticed the stain on his cuffs when they were in the car. They’d opened up again. “Never mind it. Maybe it’s for the best.” A little fresh blood never hurt the cause of appeasing the God Boyd looked like he was worshipping. It would make a bond of sorts between them, if they needed to be tied any closer, which he suspected they didn’t. For all he’d tried to forget Boyd, he’d been behind half of Raylan’s dreams since he’d been nineteen.

“Come on,” he said, and they started up the steps.

He didn’t realize until he got to the peeling paint of the door that he’d been sort of expecting it to fly open at their approach. Something real dramatic and Old Testament.

“Shit never goes crazy in a good way, you’ll notice,” he said to Ava. “We might as well knock.”

He knocked. His heart was in his throat.

The last time he’d seen Boyd, he’d seen him through a window and a curtain that had gone thin and yellow from time, no washings, and too many people in the house with pack-a-day habits. Raylan had been bleeding then, too, though not as badly as he’d been a little while earlier. That time he hadn’t knocked. He hadn’t even gone inside.

“Oh, fuck it.” He’d already decided he wasn’t going to be a coward anymore, and if that meant breaking his mother’s long-ago rule about never entering a home uninvited, well, this was a church, not a home proper, and Raylan did feel in desperate need of sanctuary.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The sun coming down on the floorboards was about all the prettiness the place could bear, because after that, it collapsed into wreckage: much of it had been trash and strange purposes over the years. Half the windows were broken. And the altar was knife-scratched enough to make it look more like a butcher’s block—that, like the dull red crosses on the trucks outside, was one more thing Raylan didn’t want to allow too far into his head. Though none of this made more than a glancing impression at all, really, because in the middle of that gutted church was Boyd Crowder, and the look on his face wasn’t any kind of thing that Raylan could put words to. It was just there, as inexorable and powerful to him as the light against the floorboards.

“Hello, Boyd,” he said, as evenly as he could. “Been a long time.”

Boyd said, “Raylan, are you real?”

“Far as I know. Ava, too.”

“Yes. I’ve been rude. Hello, Ava.”

“Hey, Boyd,” she said.

Boyd crept closer, cautious as a cat. Aside from his hands, which were more scar tissue than skin, time and Harlan hadn’t done much to him, not to look at. His eyes were the same. “I apologize for my doubts, it’s only that I’ve seen you a half-dozen times since I left Harlan, and in the end, you always disappear like smoke, or it turns out to be that I’m dreaming. Once, when I was in Alderson, you came to me in a dream, you see, like an angel of the Lord, and you pressed your hand against my chest, at the heart, and told me not to be afraid to come back to Harlan. You saved me, Raylan.”

“Boyd,” he said, “there isn’t a lot in this world you can count on more than this: I wouldn’t be telling anyone how they should go back to Harlan. Your dream lied.”

Boyd shook his head. “It was the truest thing in my whole life, as true as you standing here. May I?” He held out his hand.

Raylan lifted his arms from his sides. “As you like.” If he could get over the strangeness of seeing Boyd at all, he thought that all this might break his heart. It was best, then, for him to cling to numbness. He let Boyd touch him, map out the solid flesh and bone, the plain reality of him, because he couldn’t think anyway, and Boyd’s hands were warm enough, with no scars on the palms or the pads of his fingers.

Boyd reconnected with him piece by piece, touching his hands and shoulders and sides. Raylan had made love that was less thorough than this and, to his discomfort, he felt heat stirring inside him as Boyd settled one hand over the side of his face, the pad of his thumb close to Raylan’s mouth.

If Raylan closed his eyes, they were just out of the mines again, and Boyd was stripping what he thought was the last of the evil off Raylan, like it wasn’t allowed to touch. “You convinced?”

His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears.

“I am convinced,” Boyd said, and settled back onto his heels for only a second before coming forward again and embracing Raylan. “Raylan Givens.”

Raylan closed his hands carefully around Boyd’s shoulders and held him for an instant.

“Raylan’s with the marshals,” Ava said.

“I imagined something of the kind. The hat suits you, Raylan. You look almost the same. Though I suppose I’ve changed more than most. The hands.” He held them up. The crosses he’d carved in the back of his right hand ran from the nail bed of his middle finger to the wrist and then crosswise across the middle knuckles of all his fingers; the cross on the left was reversed, crossed midways across the back of the palm instead. “People always inquire as to whether it’s supposed to be one cross correctly rendered and the other upside-down, like a devil’s sign, but the truth is that I wasn’t sure which way they ought to be facing, and so compromised my choice somewhat.”

“Do they work?”

“They do.” He walked back to the scratched and gouged altar and laid hands on it like he was the sacrifice in question. “But they burn. I can’t sleep for it. Like I’ve dipped myself in kerosene.” He smiled then, and he was nineteen again, the only sun in Raylan’s world at all. “But I don’t think, Deputy U. S. Marshal Raylan Givens, that you came all the way here to ask me about my hands. I think you’re here about Jared, the man on the bridge. Raylan wants to save me, Ava, the way he saved you. He wants to take me away.”

“Prison would be better than here,” Raylan said. “ _Did_ you kill him, Boyd?”

“There were spiders in Jared’s eyes just as there are in Bowman’s, just as there’s light in you and Ava.” He came around the side of the altar again. “Raylan, how much of it do you remember?”

It was a question Raylan had tried not to ask himself much in the last twenty years. Memory, he’d found, wasn’t stone, but cloth that could be bundled up and put away someplace dark, where moths could eat it through. That there were holes in his memories of his last days in Harlan was the only thing that had kept him even halfway sane. He’d been wrapped in that thick black cloth and left to swelter and suffocate, blind in that darkness, but the moths had let him forget, and it was forgetting that had made the holes to let the light through where it would come.

It hadn’t been enough to save his marriage, and he thought that what was left of that cloth still would have choked him in the end. He would have wound up drinking himself to death in Miami, waiting for a Tommy Bucks to come along and outdraw him. But all the same, it was the forgetting that had let him pretend that the sense of the world was not in some places as easy to shatter as glass.

It was the forgetting that had kept Boyd in half his dreams instead of all of them. The forgetting that meant that he hadn’t made himself into a grotesquerie, a carnival freak preacher man, cutting at himself to ward off an evil that lived in the ground but spread its touch, like the finest tendrils of a vine, out through the world entire.

He remembered Boyd pulling him away from what had been waiting for them down in the mine. He remembered the shape of the darkness around them and the heaviness of it.

And he remembered leaving.

( _I was asked a question._ )

He thought of the bright canaries in their cages, though all of that had been before his time.

“Enough, I suppose.”

He knew how much of it Boyd remembered: no moths to gnaw at his memories of Harlan. They were not allowed. Only the flies.

“Then you remember that it was like the beginning of a play, when they draw the curtain back, and you can see that all along there were things behind it that you never expected, and after that, behind every such swathe of velvet, you knew that there were—secrets. There were those things which were hidden, secret to you but aware of you, for you were not secret to them, but you did not matter, especially—until you saw.”

“We were witnesses,” Raylan said.

Ava had borne them patiently enough, sitting down in one of the splintery pews that had lasted long enough to meet her, but now she said, “What did you witness?”

Raylan could tell even from her tone, the lilt of the question, that she had gotten the wrong end of it: she thought that there had been some _action_ that they’d seen, like a murder, and that somehow, it had been bad enough to send Raylan running and Boyd mad, but that hadn’t been so. Nothing had happened. Even the collapse had been—after. The natural consequence of what they’d become, and what attention they’d drawn to themselves. Raylan had never given a name to what it was, though. He had defined it from the outside-in, circling around the habits he’d found dimmed his eyes to the spiders or the cracks, the places where there were pockets and threads of darkness enough for it to take root and grow. Best, after all, to think around it wherever he could. The more he saw of it, the more it saw of him; the more he knew it, the more it knew him. He’d taken shelter in not-knowing, and let the moths come.

“It doesn’t have a name,” Boyd said. “Or if it does, Ava, it has a thousand, and none of them true. We witnessed _it_. We bore witness to it existing at all. It was—darkness, I suppose. Just darkness, but we saw that it was alive. And after that, we saw that it was everywhere.”

There was gooseflesh on Ava’s legs, bare underneath her dress. The air in the church was hot and still. Whether she wanted to or not, whether she thought it was sane or not, she believed. Of course she did. She had been living with Bowman Crowder in a house so infested with darkness that it took shape and crawled across the sheets of her bed, the wood of her kitchen table, the loose strands of her hair. She knew that there were places where the darkness waited, and held you, just as she knew that there were always people, like Bowman, who took it into their hearts and homes like a lover.

“Is it safe here? It must be, you stay.”

“It’s safer here than some other places,” Boyd said. He turned his head, and a spot of sunlight bloomed on his cheek like a rose. “I think it’s the windows. And the company, of course. But where’s safe and where’s not—there’s no door you can close against it for good. It’s all a matter of how you turn your head. Sometimes the darkness is there, and sometimes you bring it, like tracking mud across a floor. Even what I did to my hands—that won’t hold. It isn’t the sign that does it, and truth be told, I’m not even sure it’s God. It’s just—a way of turning the head, is all. Look at that, and you won’t see this. A diversion. If there’s any place where you don’t put your mind to it… Well, Raylan knows, don’t you, Raylan?”

“You try not to see,” Raylan said, “and then sometimes you don’t.” His eyes were hot. “Boyd, why’d you stay? Why’d you _come back_? Why didn’t you just take Ava and go, both of you, get the hell out of here? You could have found me.”

“I could have found you anywhere. But you told me to come back.” Boyd laid a hand over his heart, more like a man retracing a wound than a man taking an oath. “You were all light, and you drove out all the darkness of the world, and you told me not to be afraid to come home. That you’d follow me here, and we would end things. You said you’d come and bring the light. And then you—and then I woke up, in Alderson, and I served the rest of my time quiet as a church-mouse, and they let me go. Good behavior. Wherever you go, Raylan, you can always come home again. Home’s the place that wants you, and spreads its arms to take you in.”

“Listen to me,” Raylan said. “That was a dream. Hell, that was—that was just this place. You got away, and it did what it did to bring you back. But I’m here, right now, and real, and I’m telling you, Boyd, this is whatever kind of end you want. We leave, and we don’t come back, none of us, and so far as I’m concerned, they can dig so much darkness under Harlan that the ground caves in and takes everyone with it, and maybe _then_ you come back and seed it with salt. But only then.”

Ava was on her feet. “Raylan,” she said. “Boyd.”

The light from the windows had changed, gone gray as old newspaper.

“Too early for dark,” she said. The thunder that came on the heels of her words was like a sheet being shaken out, and with it came the water flung in great lashes against the glass. “That’s awfully sudden for any kind of storm. And the light—it’s green. Could be a tornado coming. Is there a basement?”

Boyd’s smile was a hundred years old. “Of course, Ava. A storm cellar, actually. Though the light there has never worked.” He turned to Raylan. “You see? None of us are going anywhere but down into the dark.”


	5. the shape of him was just a glove

**v. the shape of him was just a glove**

 

The storm cellar was damp enough that the air inside felt as heavy as wool. There were piles of old newspapers that had gone slack and gray like old skin. When Ava accidentally brushed against them in her struggle to find a light switch or cord in the hopes that Boyd had been wrong, they shivered like pillars of jelly. It smelled like rot down there; old vegetables turned to decay. There were probably worse places to die, but none of them came to Raylan right off-hand. He kept the doors propped open to let that strange green light in: there was no sense in shutting themselves in the dark before they were sure they had to.

Boyd came and stood beside him. The wind stirred at his hair. He’d worn it like that when they were younger, too, only then it had gotten flattened mostly by the helmets they wore in the mines, and it was only when it was clean when he first came to work that Raylan saw it sticking up straight as a squirrel’s tail. He itched to brush at it, the way he’d done once or twice back then, but he kept his hands to himself. Safer that way. He said, “Thought we’d take in our fresh air while we can.”

Boyd tilted his head, like the dog in the old Victrola commercials, and said, “You listen, you can hear the whistle. It’s coming sooner than you’d like.”

And there it was: that long, far-off whine, like a train’s mournful call. “I’ll wait until I see the leaves move. Ava, you found that light yet?”

“Not to any purpose. Boyd’s right, it’s busted to hell.”

“I’ve replaced the bulb to no effect,” Boyd said mildly. “It’s a place consigned to darkness underneath a place consigned to light. It’s the one that allows the other.”

“It makes payment,” Raylan said. He was still watching the trees. The leaves were stirring only a little, blowing in delicate circles around their stems, and none of them were falling as of yet. They were getting closer, though. He’d seen houses after tornadoes had come through that were green from being plastered with leaves, and that was the easiest part of it: there were also walls reduced to splinters and plaster, livestock missing or dead, and people wandering the streets empty-eyed and far away. “It’s the church that dug the cellar to put the darkness in.”

“Raylan, don’t talk that way when we’re stuck down here till the storm passes.” Ava came up by them and lifted her face to what was left of the sun. In the eerie flat lime of the light, she looked otherworldly. “When it’s over, we can still leave, the way you said. You can take us to Lexington, or we can just keep going, the three of us. Where were you before you came back?”

“Miami.” The leaves started to turn like tops, and as he watched, a handful of them were torn away. It was time for him to close the doors and pull the bar across them, but he was frozen in place.

“Did you like it there?”

“It was sunny,” Raylan said. “And where I lived, in the city, there were lights on all night long.”

“Then we’ll go there,” Ava said. He could see the steel in her now, the kind that must have rusted painfully inside Bowman Crowder’s poisonous house: he could see the woman who had tried to shoot her husband. He could see, too, that waking up on the kitchen floor with the shotgun gone out of her hand and her man still sitting there stuffing his face and laughing at her had driven her just a little mad. Not so much as Boyd and not even so much as him, but mad all the same. A person aware, whatever she said, of the way the cracks could let the darkness in, even in Miami.

Still, she spoke with a kind of desperate courage. Her hair lifted up in the wind and floated around her head like a halo. “We’ll go, and we’ll drink, and we’ll take a boat out to watch the sun on the water. Two suns, twice as good. All the light you can stand.”

“Think of that, then,” Boyd said, “because we have to close the door now.”

Ava nodded: it was a decision they’d come to around Raylan, without him, and he felt somehow isolated by it. They had not been frozen or afraid, they had only been waiting for him. The three of them hadn’t been together, after all.

He reached up and swung the doors down. Ava pushed the bar straight across the door.

Just like that, the darkness wrapped around them.

Ava said, “I got a lighter,” but Boyd said, “Never mind it. All it will make are shadows, and in the shadows, you may see shapes—the mind turns to it, and there it is. So we, we—we turn the mind. Let’s all close our eyes. Raylan, tell us about Miami.”

The wind rattled the storm cellar door. Raylan tried to remember Miami, but all he could think of was the broken light in his closet at the hotel in Lexington, and the way he had woken in the night to think that the darkness at the floor of it was taller than it had been when he’d gone to sleep. Then Ava took one of his hands and Boyd took the other, and it flung a window open in his mind. There was light.

He looked through: “Miami—there are palm trees some places along the road, and they look dusty all year round, like just being next to all those cars knocks the tropics off them. It was real quick that I stopped thinking of them as romantic. They aren’t so pretty, day to day. But there are places that are. The man I killed, what got me sent here, that was at this rooftop café. You could see the water if you looked. And people wore white, but not vanilla white, the Southern kind, but clean as cotton. No yellow or ivory in at all, no color. It’s like everything just gets bleached away.”

He ran his thumb over the cross-scar on the back of Boyd’s hand. Boyd didn’t flinch. There was a callus on the side of one of Ava’s fingers, and he traced it, too.

The wind was loud. He couldn’t hear himself talk and he couldn’t hear himself think, but there was no thinking involved here, and he could talk all the same.

There was no darkness. There were no shadows. Just the three of them, hands locked together, on a beach in Miami, all dressed in white with their feet bare in the surf.

That made him remember something: “Ava, you never did put on your shoes.”

There was no answer but the whirlwind.

“We’ll go to Miami. The marshals there won’t have me back, but fuck them. I’ll drive an ice cream truck, teach firearms, something.”

“I do admire that selling Fudgesicles ranks higher to you than firearms instruction,” Boyd said. “That is an impractical but touching innocence, Raylan.”

He didn’t know if he could hear Boyd because the storm was dropping away from them or just because it was Boyd. He swallowed. He said, “That’s all I can think of, about Miami.”

“I imagine everything blue and white. From the water, and the sand, and the men in their white suits, the ladies in their white dresses. Is it like that?”

“Very like.” Although Raylan himself always remembered Miami as yellow and brown from the sun and the trunks of the palm trees, the dyed hair and leathery skin of the men and women who had lived there too long—and the sand was yellow and brown, too, not sugar sand the way Boyd thought. He liked Boyd’s version of Miami better, though, so he gave into it and let Boyd write the world according to his dream of Raylan’s story.

He searched his mind. “And there are things you never saw in Harlan.” He was thinking of the Cubans, both the children playing soccer in the street and the old families that were the reigning aristocracy of the city; of places that didn’t open and blaze their lights until after sunset; and of the men you could see sometimes who were holding hands as they walked.

He could hear Ava now. “As opposed to all those things you see in Harlan that aren’t out in the world?”

He laughed. “As opposed to, yes.” Though once, in the flat, hot sunlight of Miami, he had seen a young woman in a torn bathing suit standing on a street corner. She’d had a bloody nose and had been holding one arm stiff at her side. By the time he’d gotten closer, she’d disappeared, like nothing more than a shimmer above the blacktop, and he’d realized that it wasn’t that she was gone. Not really. It was only that he had, on his way over to her, relearned the trick of not seeing such things—his apocalyptic last days in Harlan had been filled with worse things than the bloody-nosed girl, and he had blinked them out of his eyes like dust.

“Raylan, don’t do that.”

There was the old man he had seen outside of Boyd’s house on his last night. His eyes had been the foggy color of cobwebs and Raylan had known right away that he wasn’t really a man. The shape of him was just a glove, and inside he was burnt paper and dead flies and coal dust. He was the color of the paint on their kitchen wall, the peeled part that Raylan looked at when Arlo was laying into him. He was the gravestone out in the yard with the last date left undone. He was the slurry. He was rusted water from a pipe where there should have been sweet, he was the piss-smell, he was never getting out of Harlan. He was the blood and the bruise. He was the stick, there to remind Raylan of the deal they’d made, and enforce it. When he walked towards Raylan, he left no footprints in the grass—

“Raylan, for God’s sake, Raylan, _stop_.”

\--even though his boots were heavy. Shitkickers used hard by time. They were a promise, too, of what he could expect if the honey in the honey trap lured him in after all, and he decided to stay. They were the promise of how things could end for him and for Boyd if Raylan didn’t—

“We’ll eat ice cream all day long,” Ava said. Her voice was strange. She sounded like she was screaming each word, so far away that it came to him almost normal in volume, but with the pitch all wrong. “In the back of your truck, me and Boyd. We’ll help you pass things out, but when you’re not looking, we’ll steal all your Rocket Pops and Drumsticks—Boyd, what do you want? What are you going to steal out of a Raylan’s ice cream truck?”

“Dreamsicles,” Boyd said.

“Those them orange and white sherbet pops?”

“The very same. Orange and vanilla. Raylan will never sell a one of them, will you, Raylan?” Someone, or more than one someone, chafed at his hands, but that was impossible, because he was outside Boyd’s house on a night that had no stars and no moon, and the old man with the darkness inside him was so close now that Raylan could feel his breath and smell the death on his skin. It was like the damp in the cellars, like the newspapers that had turned to soggy flesh in the dark. Where was he? How were they holding onto him?

Boyd said, with a desperation Raylan wouldn’t have expected from him, not when Boyd had forever been the calm one, even with his mutilated hands, even with everything: “Raylan, did I ever tell you that I saw you play baseball, once? Not for the school. Just down in the holler, where the Bennett boys had the diamond marked out with tape and chalk they’d lifted, and you were playing the night in. Now, I never could hit worth a damn, or throw straight, but I was there to watch on account of how I was friendly a while back then with Dickie Bennett, and he’d invited me to see him whip your ass, as he assumed the day would go. I wanted to see the game, since Bowman thought he might just take up baseball as well as football when he came into high school. That was a mistaken notion. Baseball is a game that requires patience, and Bowman never did have that, not even then.”

“He won’t watch it when it’s on the TV, either,” Ava said. She was not screaming at him from somewhere else, now, but she had the same hopelessness in her voice that Boyd did, the same strain, as if she were reaching for something that refused to fall within her grasp. “I always liked it, myself, because it draws the day out. And because you played, Raylan.”

The old man outside Boyd’s house did not block Boyd’s door. He wasn’t in the way at all as Raylan climbed the porch steps. Even with his back turned, Raylan could feel those eyes on him, and it was like the touch of some clammy hand; nothing like the hands on him now, warm and tight and alive, trying to anchor him in place. He didn’t know yet whether he was drowning or floating away. He tried to remember the evening Boyd was talking about, that springtime evening out in the holler with the bases made of old hubcaps and broken-down cardboard boxes. They’d played the night in, as Boyd had put it, and kept the whistle and crack of ball-and-bat going as the sky above them turned a hazy violet. He tried to remember Boyd being there, but he’d been seventeen then, and he wouldn’t have known Boyd from Adam.

But somehow, in a voice that croaked like a bullfrog’s, he said, “You had licorice whips.”

“ _Raylan_. Yes.” Boyd sounded like he was going to cry. “I had licorice whips, because Mags had been trying for weeks to get rid of them, on account of how she had never meant to order them in the first place—just a slip of the pen on the form, and there she had a dozen boxes of licorice whips that were on sale for months. No one wanted them, so she dropped them down to something like a quarter a box just to keep from throwing them away, and I bought two for the game. I believe I considered myself a concession stand, selling licorice whips and root beer to both teams because no one wanted to stop playing, even though it was long past supper-time. It was an entrepreneurial venture.”

“But I didn’t have any money.”

“No, you did not. Well, none that you would spend, in any case, for you’d rather go hungry than lose a dollar to me for a licorice whip, which is pride, Raylan. You were trying to save.”

“You gave me one anyway.”

“A licorice whip, and a root beer, and when you struck out Dickie, I believe I may have smiled, which put a fast end to that friendship, and no mistake. I remembered you when our paths crossed again, but I always imagined that you’d forgotten that evening.”

“I had, until you said it. Like finding the hidden Indians in a picture.”

“ _Can you find the Boyd Crowder in your memories_?” Ava murmured, her voice closing quotes around it. “ _There are three._ I used to see those in dentist’s offices, but there’d always been someone before me with a crayon picking everything out, so there never was any sport to it. Are you here now, Raylan? For good and all?”

He could hear rain and wind outside and feel Boyd and Ava’s hands locked around his. He could smell the rotting newspapers. Probably there were silverfish inside them, in-between the folds, but it was best not to think of that, lest his mind slide away from him again—get turned, as Boyd had put it, towards things it was better not to consider. He tried to keep his thoughts on that baseball game at dusk when he’d struck out Dickie Bennett and the boy who’d given him the licorice whip had grinned at him like he was the sun coming up.

“I’m here.” He’d opened a door that could have let the monsters in for them all, and shame curdled in his stomach. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“You’re out of practice being in Harlan,” Boyd said. “That’s all. You’ll remember how to keep your balance, and then you won’t fall like that.”

“I fell?”

“We caught you,” Ava said simply.

“Storm’s dying down a little,” Boyd said. “Safe to go out soon.”

Raylan thought of the man with the cobweb eyes. There hadn’t been a storm then. A laugh rose up in his throat, with the feeling that he was going to vomit, and he said, “Safe as ever, anyhow.”


	6. ascribed it a position

**vi. ascribed it a position**

 

They climbed up out of the cellar an hour later, when they were sure that the storm had passed through and was not holding them in its eye. Some of the trees around the church had been ripped from the ground by the roots and flung away like abandoned toys; there were hailstones making the earth throw white gauze curtains up into the air.

Raylan had not been much enamored of letting go of Boyd and Ava—he hadn’t grown cowardly down in the darkness so much as clingy, like a child, and more apt to trust their judgment than his own—but he figured that to be a shameful thing not worth admitting to, so he dropped his hands first and gave them leave to wander. They held onto each other just a little bit longer, but then they broke, too, and whatever conduit they’d made in the cellar, where it had seemed reasonable to dream of Miami and ice cream trucks, was broken. He remembered that he had come to Harlan to take Boyd back to Lexington in cuffs.

He parted from them a ways and walked near the edge of the trash-wood strip that was now mostly shitty timber and the wheel off one of the front yard cars. He trusted that Boyd and Ava had gone back to the church, which was still enclosed behind the mist.

Now that it came to it, he supposed he had some hope that they would get away from him. They were all a danger to each other as much as they were a help. They could run one way out of Harlan and he could run another, with no chase, and everyone would get away from everything, and with everything, and that would be fine with him.

He checked his phone. Sixteen missed calls and seven voicemails, shit. He ignored the calls and went straight to voicemail—six from Art and one from Winona, who said in a shaky voice that she’d heard he was back and out in Harlan for the day and was he all right? Had he been caught in the storm?

Art’s messages ran from brisk—“Raylan, dammit, check in, there’s supposed to be a tornado cutting through Harlan anytime now”—too worried—“Just call and tell us you’re holed up somewhere, okay? Looks awfully shitty on my part to lose a marshal first day”—to still as the grave, like Raylan was gone and he knew it—“Call me if you get this… if there’s someone else who has found this phone, it belongs to Deputy U. S. Marshal Raylan Givens, of the Lexington office—” and it was the last part that made Raylan feel like shit. Art was trying to get to him even if he were dead, trying to reason with whoever had found or lifted his phone post-catastrophe.

He called in. The phone didn’t even ring once.

“Jesus Christ, Raylan!”

“I was in a storm cellar,” Raylan said, “at a church. Not much signal out here at the best of times, least of all underground, but I might have thought to call in before I went down, or check the phone, and I’m sorry I didn’t. It was never my intention to worry you.”

“Intention or not, do you know Tim’s been on the phone with every rescue crew going through Harlan, trying to see if they’ll look for your body? And Rachel talked to Winona, to see if you’d called her, and I’m halfway to Harlan now to see if _I_ could dredge up your sorry ass.”

Raylan’s hand clenched around the phone and the casing squeaked a little at the seam. “Don’t come to Harlan, Art. No need for that. I didn’t get so much as a bump on the head.”

“You find Boyd?”

Raylan glanced over towards where he’d last seen him, the people who had caught him as he’d fallen through the darkness, and he saw that the mist had cleared some.

The church was gone. Smashed to bits about as substantial as matchsticks and toothpicks. Woodchips and tarpaper and the occasional needle-sharp shard of glass glittering in what there was of the sun. No more windows to lure and catch the sunlight and no more walls to keep that light in and the darkness out. It was all so thoroughly gone that the tornado might have swept itself into and out of existence just to come right through Harlan above their heads and uproot their sanctuary like a weed.

He wondered how long Boyd had been living there, in that place that buried its darkness and held fiercely to its light and he wondered if Boyd had any idea of what Raylan now knew to a damned certainty—that the church was gone now because Raylan had come back.

All the prizes were in one place, and it was time for Harlan to stop pretending that it didn’t have the whole game rigged as neatly as a carnival’s shell game. He thought he’d gotten away, but he hadn’t. There had always been a hand on his collar waiting to haul him back into play. All he’d ever bought, with his trade, was time, and all that time had run out now. There was none left for him and there was none left for Boyd. Probably none for Ava, either, standing carefully in one of the splotches of grass she’d kicked free of hailstones and debris to be safe on her bare feet. They were all of them, as Boyd had said, going down into the dark.

“Raylan!”

“Sorry, Art,” he said. His mouth felt numb. “There’s not much signal out here, like I said. What was that last part?”

“Did you find Boyd Crowder?”

Boyd was standing in the center of what was left of his church. Raylan saw him only in silhouette—shoulders hunched and hands tucked in the pockets of his sweater, but his head still up, for all of that. He was a dark shape, a hole in the milky paleness of the sky, and yes, Raylan was plenty afraid of him, but he wasn’t the darkness itself, just the stone thrown into the well to see what darkness could be driven up. The canary in the coal mine.

“No,” Raylan said. “I haven’t come across him yet.” He had no notion of why he was lying. “I met with Bowman and Ava Crowder, and Ava’s with me now. She might have a notion of where Boyd’s been laying his head lately, and might tell me in exchange for me getting her away from Bowman.”

“He hits her?”

“What do you think?”

“I think Bowman Crowder always seemed like an asshole to me, and so I’m not what you’d call surprised at the development. Is she all right?”

“Glad to be away from him.”

“And she’s not going to change her mind in a few hours, start whaling on you for taking her away from her sweet honey-pie?”

“Not that I can tell. Doesn’t seem the type.”

“Well, get her back to Lexington and see if she’ll talk. We’ll put her up in a motel somewhere as a witness, though as a witness to what I’m sure I don’t fucking know, but there’s no point in the two of you cooling your heels in Harlan. It’s going to be nothing but ambulances and fire trucks and end times bullshit in and out of there all day and probably all week, too.”

“End times?” He was thinking, _Art, you have no fucking idea._

“Well, Raylan, I believe in God. I’m just not fool enough to think that the apocalypse is nigh upon us every time things start turning to shit. I started thinking like that, I’d never get out of bed in the morning, because something, somewhere, has always just turned to shit, and in Harlan, that’s about every fifteen minutes. But get your ass back here, and I’ll pour you and Ava some coffee and we can discuss my views on the fringier elements of my religion as much as you please. Maybe even do some marshal work, you know, just for the hell of it.”

“Will do,” Raylan said, and clicked the phone closed.

He walked over to Boyd and Ava. Ava, crested on the little rise of land that she had cleared for herself, looked like a mermaid carved onto the prow of a ship. He was more comfortable standing with her than standing with Boyd, who, for all his stillness, looked and felt like a grenade with the pin already pulled. Ava leaned against him and he put his arm around her waist. They were both watching Boyd. Raylan said, “For a woman who was skeptical when I met her a few hours before, you’re taking all this somewhat in stride. The darkness. The storm. Whatever—whatever was happening in the cellar, when I started thinking of things best left unremembered.”

She smiled. “How much you remember about your high school physics class, Raylan?”

“Something about equal and opposite reactions along the lines of how punching a man in the face also usually leaves you with a busted knuckle or two, but not much besides that. I suppose we remember those things which make sense to us at the time.”

“For me, it was the theory of relativity. Oh, not so much the theory itself, the details, but just that there was one—that Einstein, smartest man in the world, sat down and drew up something that was about the underpinnings of the universe, on how time was sometimes fast and sometimes slow, and it was something that I knew already about the world. That I could be with my friends, or,” she added with a slight, far away spark in her eyes, “watching you play baseball, and time would be going one way, but then I’d be sitting in class, or waitressing, with that pain in the small of my back, and having to smile for all them people, and time wouldn’t move a lick until it suited it to do so. That’s relativity.

“Or that’s how they explained it to us, anyway, and it made sense to me. It was like Einstein had taken something that never made no sense at all, except a little in your soul, where you knew it was true, and he’d written these rules for it. He’d ascribed it a position, somehow, so that what you thought was just you, just in your head, was actually something down in the workings of things, like a cog or a wheel. And for a second, everything just lined up, like the whole world made a little more sense. Because at last you had a reason.”

She stepped down off the prow of her imaginary ship and his hand rose up around her shoulders. She was just a woman again, tired and a little afraid. “Living in that house, day in and day out, I learned a lot about how time can stretch so that it seems like every second’s gonna last forever. And I learned a lot about darkness. I suppose there’s some comfort in believing the two of you, in saying that there’s something behind it all. That I wasn’t crazy for trying to burn that house down myself a time or two. Oh, Bowman blamed it all on Boyd, but twice it was me, and I didn’t succeed any better than he had. You know something?”

“I ought to keep you away from any kind of matchbook?”

“I don’t think it wanted to be burned,” she said softly. “I think it’s like a person, and it’ll fight to save its life. Ain’t that the scariest thing you ever thought of?”

“Everyone wants to save their life,” Raylan said. There was a sour taste in his mouth.

She followed his eyes. “Why do you look at him like that?”

“How’s that?”

Ava shrugged. “The way you do, Raylan, you know what it is. Like you can’t not look.”

She waited for him to say something, but there was nothing for him to say.

“You know, Bowman always said Boyd was in love with you. He blamed you for it, said his brother was normal until you came along, and then he was queer as a three-dollar bill, and crazy besides. Did you love him back? That ain’t so bad.”

“I don’t suppose it would have been, no.”

Raylan knelt down and picked up a hailstone. It was cool and sweating in his hand, and dirty from its rough collision with the earth. He wasn’t sure what he wanted with it, besides it just being a distraction. It was just one more thing he could hold onto until he made it disappear. His hand brought on its thaw.

“I don’t know, Ava. Whatever happened back then, it ripped up the inside of my head like this storm came through it. Or, hell, maybe I did that to myself. Whatever it was, I don’t remember it. I don’t even know if you’re right about Boyd. I mean, God knows I wouldn’t trust Bowman Crowder’s assessment of human nature very far under better circumstances. Boyd never said anything to you?”

“I can hear you, you know,” Boyd called back. If Ava was tired, he was exhausted. He turned around and picked his way back through the debris. “So far as I can tell, I have not made my life available as a subject for discussion, not to either of you, whatever place you hold in my heart. Is that clear?”

“Sorry,” Ava said.

Boyd met Raylan’s eyes. “Raylan?”

Raylan had lied to Ava, a little. He did know that Bowman Crowder, asshole or not, had been close enough to right about his brother.

Still, he didn’t apologize to Boyd, because he had the feeling that he would be too late to get forgiveness for anything that mattered, and there was no sense wasting his breath or their time. “Let me get you out of Harlan. Both of you.”

“Hell, yes,” Ava said.

Boyd just looked at him. “You see what’s happened here already, when we tried to take shelter. Do you really think Lexington’s going to be any different? Do you think it mattered to _it_ when I was in Alderson or Kuwait? It’s easier for it, here, but what we found in those mines doesn’t lose its reach at city limits, Raylan, as I suspect you know.”

The blood spatter across Tommy Bucks’s shirt, and Raylan staring down the smoking barrel of his gun, wondering why in hell he had done something so risky. Or even Tommy Bucks in Nicaragua, taping a stick of dynamite between a man’s teeth—had Raylan seen spiders skitter across the whites of his eyes, then, through the dark and the cigar smoke? Had it all been some elaborate game, pieces moved slowly and one by one, just to get him here? He thought maybe. He thought yes. Yes, its reach was long, and yes, it had them where it wanted them. Yes, he had just sweetened himself for it by getting away, and thinking he’d made an escape. There was darkness in the closet of his hotel room, and there had been darkness for Boyd in Kuwait, and there was darkness everywhere. They would carry it with them all the days of their lives.

But they could still run. If Harlan wasn’t much worse than other places, it still meant that other places were just a little bit better.

Miami, and ice cream trucks.

“Come anyway. Fuck, Boyd, let’s at least try.”

“You can’t blame him for not wanting to go to prison.”

“Raylan has no aim to send me to prison,” Boyd said, almost absently, and Raylan dropped the half-melted hailstone from his hand, because he’d gone cold enough just from that. There had been no way for Boyd to hear him talking to Art, not as far away as he’d been. He supposed that even Harlan didn’t take something without giving something back, even if it didn’t want to or mean to. Boyd had gotten used to seeing things others never could, and now that didn’t stop with the darkness and the light, but went on, and on, and on.

“Why lie, Raylan? To a man as good as that?”

“I think I owe it to you.”

“Because of what you can’t remember.”

“ _You_ can remember.”

“I remember everything I saw,” Boyd said, “but looking at you now, I think there were things that you saw that I was not afforded a chance to see.”

“And you don’t know?”

“No, Raylan. I don’t know what you don’t remember. I’m only curious.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” Ava said, “the two of you can sort out later who wronged who, and how, and what was in your hearts at the time, just so long as we start walking now. I don’t expect we’ve much of a chance of getting that car to run, since I can’t even put my eyes on it, but we go far enough towards people, and I suppose we’ll find a vehicle and an opportunity. This is America, after all.”

Boyd said, “Ava, maybe you go on your own, and it works, but with me and Raylan along, I can nearly promise you that you will get nowhere today.”

“Then I’ll get nowhere,” she said, and she was the mermaid again. Raylan understood why a sailor would have wanted her out ahead of him to bear him through the storm. “Because I’ll tell you what I know, Boyd Crowder, and that’s that you were the one good thing I got out of marrying Bowman. I got no inclination to walk out here and leave you behind. And Raylan, he took me out of that house. So we’ll get out together or we won’t get out at all, but I’d surely like it if we’d try. Trying never hurt anyone. And anyways, what’s our decision, we don’t do that? We just sit here in the rubble and wait for nightfall, for the long-legged beasties to come out of the dark? No thank you.”

“Might as well die trying,” Raylan said.

Boyd sighed. “Miami, Raylan?”

“There’s sunshine,” he said stubbornly. “And you get out a little ways from the city, there’s even wilderness you can have to yourself if you want. But I am open to suggestions.”

“You think we get a happy ending? After all this?”

“I think we try.”

“Shit, I deserve some happiness,” Ava said. “You can just tag along.”

At last, Boyd came all the way back to life again, and there wasn’t much left of the man who had fixed Raylan with eyes as cold as the hail around them and flatly inquired as to the extent of his memories. He doubted that Boyd would know much beyond the scope of the ordinary, now, and that was some relief. He wasn’t the sacrifice anymore, the seer with his carved hands, he was just a man that had been a boy that Raylan had known, once, and there he was again. He leaned forward and kissed Ava gently on the cheek and held his hand out to Raylan, who thought briefly about not letting go of it. The shyness of Boyd’s gesture threatened to stab him straight through the heart. They’d not been cautious of each other before.

“I’ll follow,” Boyd said. “I suppose I’ll even trust. The good Lord has worked miracles beforehand, after all, as Raylan can attest, him having been pulled from perdition once already.”

“That’s so,” Raylan said, though he was beginning to suspect that how he’d gotten out of Harlan the first time had had nothing at all to do with the Lord. He looked at the hailstone he’d dropped and watched the last of it dissolve into the soil. It was funny how that worked: how just being in the world sometimes was enough to take you out of it. “Pick a direction, then.”

“West,” Ava said, and they started walking. The hailstones made a piss-poor yellow brick road, but they were tolerable enough, Raylan imagined, as a Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man. The crazy man, thought to need the sanity he already possessed, and the woman you would have thought scared of her own shadow until she stood up at last and roared. And him, the man without a heart—it was only there that the whole thing fell apart and wouldn’t stand, because even if he had one now, he hadn’t had it, as the story ran, all along. He was starting to remember enough to know that.


	7. whatever's coming

**vii. whatever’s coming**

 

With the ground like it was, it didn’t take long for Ava’s feet to start bleeding. Raylan stripped off his jacket and cut it along the seams with Boyd’s knife; Boyd started unraveling part of his sweater to tie off the clumsy denim soles they’d made together. He looked a little sadly at the raggedness of it, now, making Raylan wonder how long he’d been wearing the damned thing, but said, “It was its time, perhaps,” like he was laying the sweater to rest. So probably Boyd was just a little crazy, after all.

“These are stylish,” Ava said, sticking out one foot to admire its new wrapper. It looked a little like a bedroom slipper after a dog had been at it for a while. “These’ll be all the rage, people see me wearing them.”

“It’s the ankles that count, not the shoes,” Raylan said. “And you not tearing your feet up any more than you already have, which you might have mentioned sooner.”

“I thought Boyd would get all creepy, take it as a sign of things to come.”

“Blood is always a sign of things to come,” Boyd said.

“Well, now,” Raylan said, “you can see there was no reason for you to be afraid of that at all.”

Whenever Boyd grinned at him like that, time went out from under Raylan’s feet like a slide. “Should insanity not provide its leavening humor, Raylan, what use is it to the world?”

“Shit, Boyd, you sound like _Patch Adams_.”

“I’m not familiar with your reference.”

“Then it might just be Harlan’s not as evil as we’ve been thinking.” He tied the last bit of Boyd’s sweater around Ava’s foot. “There you are, Cinderella. These boots were made for walking.”

“Should those come undone, which I admit I find regrettably easy to envision, we may want to consider stopping somewhere along our way to invest in _actual_ shoes. Raylan, I find I’m short of funds at the moment, and I don’t believe Ava has so much as a pocket to her now, let alone a pocketbook, so I believe you’ll have to provide for us for a time.”

Raylan had no qualms about keeping Boyd and Ava fed, clothed, and shod until and if they reached their destination, but he didn’t much care for the idea of stopping before they had cleared town. He said as much. Ava agreed, but Boyd just looked at him with that sweet equanimity, as if he knew it didn’t matter whether they stopped within Harlan’s borders or not, because they’d surely be stopping at them, when the time came. It was enough to make Raylan want to hit him. He drew his hands into fists and fell back a few paces to watch Ava’s newly awkward way of walking. It drew the grace from her but substituted something else in its place—resiliency, maybe.

Boyd slowed to match his stride. “I’ve upset you, Raylan.”

“I’d prefer a little goddamned optimism,” he said, before he realized how shitty and childish it sounded. The twenty years between them had left Boyd with more than just the scars Raylan had such trouble taking his eyes off of. He offered Boyd the peace offering of a shrug. “Or I just want you to be wrong, and I’m worried you’re not.”

“It would be better, me being wrong. If I were going to bet on someone, I’d bet on you, Raylan.”

“Because of your dream.”

To his surprise, Boyd shook his head. “Just because of you.” He stuck his hands in his pockets again. Raylan wished he knew whether Boyd did that to hide the scars, and, if that were true, he wished he could think of an easy way to tell Boyd that none of it mattered. His eyes were straight ahead. “I still don’t know how much you remember, Raylan, but—what Bowman said, about how I felt…”

Raylan would have thought he would panic, when it came down to this, but what he felt wasn’t fear but an aching sadness at _Boyd’s_ fear, at the sudden spectacle of Boyd Crowder being at a loss for words. He didn’t know whether to interrupt him or to let him finish: Boyd knew how to do this, after all. His hands proved that he had experience cutting himself to the bone.

“He told the truth as he understood it. I did love you, and I suppose I do still. I volunteer this because it seemed to need saying, but there’s nothing you have to say in return.”

“Boyd,” Raylan said, because Boyd still hadn’t turned to look at him, but Boyd rode over that.

“In fact, I think I’d prefer you didn’t. It doesn’t seem to me this is the time for it.” He did look over then. Raylan thought, _He has the kind of eyes that make you weak at the knees_ , and tried to pretend that it was something he’d once heard someone else say of Boyd. “We may as well catch up with Ava, if you’re not angry with me any longer. Even should I win you over, intuition tells me relationships aren’t meant to reach their consummation on a barren stretch of road, post-tornado.”

“I suppose it’s best that’s intuition rather than experience,” Raylan said dryly. He tried to prevent _consummation_ from echoing around in his head. It was somewhat distracting.

“Well, roads are unlovely places hereabouts. A man could do worse drawing his line in the sand.” He still sounded tentative, testing, and Raylan found at last what he was looking for, and gave it to him with no small measure of relief.

“I’m not angry, Boyd. And nothing you said came as much of a surprise, if you’re thinking that. Aside from you never having had sex roadside, which you always did seem the type for.”

“Did I really?”

“It’s a predilection in a person that reveals itself generally around the feet,” Raylan said. “A flattening of the arch. There’s a science to it all, which they taught to us in the marshals, and as such I hope you’ll not speak of it too generally, lest we lose all our mystery.” Up ahead of them, Ava made a faint sound that Raylan took as a suppressed laugh. It meant that she’d heard everything else, as well, but that didn’t seem worth the trouble of worrying about it. All they’d done was confirm for her what Bowman had already said—well, without the part about Raylan coming down to the mine that first day for the especial purpose of turning Boyd gay as a maypole.

“I would never reveal a secret so grave,” Boyd said earnestly.

Raylan reached out for his shoulder and caught him around the back of the neck instead. He held on for a second. Boyd’s skin was hot in a way that dried Raylan’s mouth up.

“I knew I could trust you,” Raylan said. He made himself let go.

They met with Ava again. “I oughtn’t be able to outpace you wearing these contraptions,” she said, just as light as whipped cream. It might have been that if Raylan had found himself overcome there on the road, Ava might have kept going even then without blinking an eye, just calmly trusting that they would catch up with her sooner or later. He wished he knew her a little better. It wasn’t right for her to already take up so much of his heart without him even knowing what her favorite flavor ice cream, so he asked her that.

“You and ice cream,” she said.

“I’ll have to make sure it’s stocked. Boyd wants Dreamsicles. No reason at all you can’t have a treat, too.”

“Strawberry,” she said.

“Now, Raylan, Dreamsicle is hardly an ice cream flavor,” Boyd said. “It is an ice cream novelty item, of the sort commonly sold in ice cream trucks. You knowing Ava’s preferred flavor hardly means that you can stock it in your imagined truck, when the ideal there is for pre-packaged single-serving items. You’ll need further inquiry. Ava, sweetheart, if you were to buy your ice cream on a stick, where do you think your eyes might wander?”

“They have this strawberry shortcake kind of bar,” Raylan said, “with some kind of sweet crumb topping on it.”

“That sounds good to me,” she said. “Especially now.” She wiped sweat away from her hairline. “It’s getting hotter. And I didn’t want to interrupt y’all before, but don’t it seem strange that we ain’t seen more people than we have?”

“Have we seen any?” Boyd asked.

“Sort of my point. As bad a storm as that, as much damage as we can see was done,” and her hands swept out to encompass the trees that were knocked down and the street signs that were bent like hot taffy, “wouldn’t there be more people out? Just making sure their neighbors were okay? Hell, I wouldn’t mind seeing a looter or two, just so I knew I was still in Harlan.”

“Oh,” Boyd said, “we’re still in Harlan. Raylan, do you have any signal here?” He had started making slow circles around them in a way that reminded Raylan of a dog herding sheep.

Raylan held up his phone. “No bars.”

“You know that smell the air has, just before the lightning comes?” Boyd lifted his hands up to the sky, palms flat in supplication, the scar tissue crosses looking down at his upturned eyes. “I believe the calm before our storm has ended, my friends, and what we have now is something much worse than a tornado. Everyone’s still inside because they know, because they sense it. Oh, they think, best to stay in, wait for the power to come back on, wait for the friend across town to call, wait until that feeling at the base of your spine passes away. There’s no chance of living in Harlan so long without knowing when it’s best to stay in your own house and tend to your own business. We are not their business, after all. A madman, a runaway wife, and a federal.”

“Dammit, Boyd, they don’t know we’re here!” But Raylan couldn’t keep himself from looking to where he could see houses a little way back from the road. All the curtains were drawn. Strange, that, in a time when there wouldn’t have been electricity to keep the lights on. Strange that people would sit in the dark rather than look out their windows.

“Ava, do you remember Shelly Newcomb?”

Ava swallowed. “She died.”

“And how did she die?”

“Aneurysm.”

“Her brain filled up with blood,” Boyd said, “on a sweet Saturday afternoon, sitting on her porch, and none of her neighbors came across her until full dark, which is surely strange to think of, with all those grills out in the yard, all those children wanting a run through the sprinkler. You look at the light where you can find it, and when you can’t—you don’t look at the darkness, that’s all. No one wants to see the things we saw, Raylan. Ava, I’m so sorry, but I don’t know that you have a choice now.”

“Whatever’s coming,” Raylan said, because damn if Boyd hadn’t fucking talked him into believing that he could feel that low hum of static, and smell the ozone, “we’ll shut it out, like we did in the cellar.”

“If it were as easy to do it always as it was in the cellar, I wouldn’t have these scars on my hands. That was a memory. A door that you were opening that we could shut. This is right here and right now, and real, and not of our own doing.”

Raylan nodded at the curtains pulled across the window. “We went to that house now and pounded on the door, what do you think would happen?”

“Oh, small town hospitality, Raylan, I’m sure they would let us in. But we would carry uninvited guests along with us, and I don’t think that’s desirable. Those people aren’t doing anything we didn’t do in their place once, and it isn’t like they understand. And as they couldn’t help us, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” He reached out and made their circle again, and then he licked his lips. They were chapped, Raylan couldn’t keep himself from seeing, and probably they were as strangely hot as his neck had been, as if all Boyd’s knowledge and fervor were burning him alive from the inside out.

Ava looked down at their linked hands. “Does this help? Really?”

“Well, Ava,” Boyd said, “it don’t hurt,” and his eyes were bottled lightning as they met Raylan’s.

Then Raylan remembered two things he’d spent some time trying to forget.

The first, and most recent, was that after Winona hadn’t followed him to Miami, he’d formed a common law alliance with the bottle while he was still waiting for the divorce papers to go through. There he had been, one Saturday night, all liquored up with no place to go, bemoaning to himself the citified nature of Miami that made it so damned hard for a man to get drunk and go out and find some real estate signpost to piss against. It was Winona he was missing, he told everyone who asked. His mind kept groping for her and finding her gone, just like a tongue going again and again to the socket of a missing tooth.

Except there were moments, when he was near blackout drunk, that a thought as light as a butterfly would lift across what was left functioning in his brain, and he would think: _What the hell. She isn’t the first one you lost._ That Saturday, he’d been trying to catch that thought and pin it to some kind of board so he could scrutinize it a little more, when he caught sight of a man at the far end of the bar.

The man had had Boyd’s shoulders and Boyd’s hands and Boyd’s hair, and Raylan had thought, _Fuck yes_ , and lurched up, only to lose his footing and come face-to-face with the barroom floor.

He’d renewed his acquaintance with long-term sobriety the next day, and he’d avoided that particular bar like there’d been a plague outbreak there in recent times.

The second thing that Raylan remembered was Boyd saying, “Because I wanted to, Raylan, from the very first time I saw you.”

Was it what he knew that would kill him or what he didn’t know?

“Boyd,” Ava was saying, “this is where you tell us that we’re gonna see things, and that’s gonna be all. There’s nothing that can hurt us here on the street in broad daylight.”

“I dearly wish that were so,” Boyd said. “As I wish I could believe it was an aneurysm that took Shelly Newcomb to the sweet hereafter. But we all know better. The darkness makes its monsters, and it’s the monsters that are coming for us now.”

Raylan had less trouble remembering the monsters: the man with the cobweb eyes, the girl in Miami with the bloody nose, the boy who had walked backwards, the sweet tree that had hatched the blowflies, and Arlo. Always Arlo.

As he called them up in his head, they ran around him like the horses on a carousel, and Ava and Boyd both held onto him a little harder, but they didn’t talk him out of it this time: Raylan’s bad memories were the least of their worries. He looked them over as they came. When the shrouded woman, her veil made of coal dust and insect wings, passed by him, Boyd said, “I can’t do that. Call them up the way you do. How can you do that, Raylan? Do you even know why you are the way you are?”

“I made them into ghosts,” Raylan said softly. “And ghosts are always at your fingertips, I suppose. These are the ones that belong to me.”

He brought nineteen year-old Boyd into the world to walk easily across the surface of it.

“He doesn’t look like that,” Ava said. “And he didn’t then, either.”

“I don’t suppose I did,” Boyd said. He couldn’t take his eyes off himself. “Raylan, there’s nobody in the world ever looked like that.”

Raylan didn’t understand what they meant: it was Boyd as he remembered him, and he could still see the resemblance between that Boyd and the one beside him.

“Send him on his way, Raylan.” Ava stepped closer to them both, closing their circle in so tight that her makeshift denim slippers touched the toes of Raylan’s and Boyd’s boots. “He doesn’t belong, not with what’s coming.” She wasn’t wrong, so he closed his eyes and let the wind blow Boyd’s ghost away to some backwater of Raylan’s mind. His smile lingered like a Cheshire cat’s, like an after-image burned onto Raylan’s eyelids, but then even that was gone, along with his parade of darkness.

The lightning hum lifted up the hair on his neck.

“It’s here,” he said, and Boyd gave him a look like he was a complete asshole.

“It’s always here,” Boyd said.

The darkness came like a flash flood, and Raylan choked on ashes and slurry water and vomit, gone blind to the world. The last thing he could tell was that Boyd and Ava were gone, that he’d let go of their hands, and now they were all three of them lost for good.


	8. nineteen/thirty-eight

**viii. nineteen/thirty-eight**

 

The summer the skin of his world collapsed in on itself like rotten fruit, Raylan Givens was nineteen.

At some later point, he was thirty-eight, a Deputy US Marshal with blood on his hands and out-of-state dust still on his boots, but that didn’t seem to matter to him, because he was nineteen, and he was following Boyd Crowder down into the dark gullet of the mineshaft.

It was in his head that he was getting to like Boyd more than was helpful to him. Lately, when Boyd went ahead of him into the mine, charges in hand, Raylan fidgeted until Boyd came out, leaving wires in trail behind him like a record of where he’d been in the forever he’d spent away. It was a restlessness he wasn’t fond of. Plans of storing away enough of his check each payday to make it out of Harlan by the time he turned twenty were plans that had a way of disintegrating when Boyd looked at him the way he did sometimes, like Raylan was a shot of whiskey and Boyd had a thirst.

It boded ill for the both of them that Raylan was starting to catch himself looking back the same way, from time to time, when sweat glistened on the back of Boyd’s neck or his smile carved a hard slash of light in the darkness below.

But he was nineteen, and a fool, and Boyd was all he had in his life that didn’t hurt all the time.

He was following Boyd down. He was listening to the soft scrape of their work-boots. He was watching the baby-shit yellow lanterns they had strung up vibrate slightly from the machines. There other men behind them, but they all found their separate places as they settled into work, and sooner or later, it was just him and Boyd. Partnerships formed like that in the mines. They weren’t supposed to—it was more efficient working every-man-for-himself, with the miners scattered more evenly, and keeping their mouths shut besides—but they did nonetheless, because the darkness was a hard thing to handle without someone familiar by your side.

There was something wrong that day from the beginning.

Boyd had come back to him, of course, to bring Raylan that sense of relief that was starting to trouble him more than his damned worry, but he’d come back a little white-faced, and his answers to Raylan’s questions were a little disconnected, as if they had a bad telephone line and he was getting only one word in three. Now he seemed more like himself. When Raylan hit him gently on the arm, though, and said, “What had you so riled before?” it was plain that Boyd didn’t know what he was talking about.

They were working in near-silence, too, which was also wrong. Boyd wasn’t anyone’s idea of a chatterbox, exactly—Raylan had seen him sit in company with strangers for hours before he would even open his mouth, with some bred-in-the-bone caution that made each word slow and careful and _show-offy_ , somehow—but with Raylan, he was a natural born talker. Half of it was bullshit and half of it was sincerity so plain it was uncomfortable to listen to, but what it wasn’t was quiet.

At thirty-eight, his skin lapped by the dry snakeskin tongue of the living darkness, he thought confusedly that he had been wrong then about Boyd’s way of talking, because it seemed like he could remember a hundred times the two of them had sat in easy silence.

At nineteen, he knew that nothing about this silence was easy. It was the silence that came from a boot on the throat.

There was a wasp’s nest outside his house that summer, hung up in a tree by the fucking Givens family graveyard, and Raylan had grown peculiarly sensitive to the drone of insects going about their business. He had as one of his formative memories the experience of putting his foot straight through what had felt like old shredded newspaper or the grass from an Easter basket, only to have paper wasps come up around him in a dark cloud full of stingers and the flat, angriest buzzing he’d ever heard. That, with his recent cause for dread, had put him on edge for the sound, and when he heard it coming from a little farther down the shaft, he reached out and grabbed Boyd’s shoulder.

“Boyd, listen.”

Boyd turned his ear down unquestioningly to the bottom of the shaft. His face was filthy already, smudged with dust everywhere but one spot, and Raylan looked at it and thought, _Fuck._

“I hear it,” Boyd said.

They took themselves further up and stopped another pair, who were more than happy to come down a little ways and stand listening to the darkness, but no one else could hear it—what Boyd thought sounded like a busted lawnmower and Raylan thought sounded like the wasps. They went back to their places, but the noise worked itself inside his head like a drill, until he said, “I can’t even think. Come on,” and stepped away from the pile of rubble he’d made.

“It doesn’t go much deeper than this,” Boyd said. “We’re fairly close to the bottom.”

“Maybe you tapped a river.” It was the kind of thing Raylan had heard about, but it was always a third-hand story that was tattered around the edges and had no real names in it. “They told you where to lay the charges, right?”

“Why no, Raylan,” Boyd said, “they didn’t. I’ve been meaning to tell you that for the last few weeks I’ve simply been blowing shit up wherever it pleases me. I thought it might have consequences eventually, but the impulse was too great to resist.”

“Okay, so I’m an asshole. You can let it go anytime you like.”

They were past the point now where the first ones down after Boyd had tacked the lanterns to the walls, and Raylan thought that he was going to stub his toes on sheer rock if he walked too fast, so he slowed to a crawl. The buzzing should have been getting louder as they got closer, but all it was doing was getting _further in_ , until Raylan didn’t know if there was any sound at all, or if he just had a headache so bad it was making him blind.

“Boyd,” he whispered.

Boyd struck the wheel of his lighter, which everyone knew was a stupid fucking thing to do in a mine, no matter how careful the company supposedly was, but the flame that came up was bright, pure, and perfectly contained. It was like a rose petal.

Either it was the most beautiful thing Raylan had ever seen or Boyd was, his skin golden in that wavery light. Boyd was beautiful even with his left eye filled up with blood the way it was then. Raylan looked at him, and he wanted to look, he _had_ to look, because even at nineteen he was aware of what was all around them. He knew they had somehow walked into hell, but if he just kept his eyes and his heart and his mind on Boyd, he would be safe. _It won’t know I see it. It won’t know I see it. It won’t know. It won’t know._

It was like a conch shell. You pressed it to your ear and you said the reasonable thing you had heard about the world, that it was just an amplified echo of the rest of the world, of the blood rushing through your own body. But in your heart, you knew better. You knew it was something alien to you.

So Raylan, at nineteen, stood in that mineshaft with his eyes on Boyd Crowder, and he thought, _It’s only darkness_. The dark was nothing to be afraid of.

It was Boyd that tore away his ability to pretend. Boyd, who hadn’t spent even a day since he’d met Raylan not knowing what he felt for him, and so didn’t have the same practice at lying to himself.

The darkness had flayed all the eloquence from his tongue, but it didn’t matter: he didn’t have to say _It’s alive_ or _It knows we’re here_ or even _Look_. The second his eyes widened and his mouth opened, the fierce battle of inattention that Raylan had been waging was lost for good. They knew, and now it knew they knew, and there was nothing in the world that could save them from that knowledge. Raylan felt some vital and previously unknown part of his sanity slip quietly away from him.

The lighter slipped from Boyd’s hand and struck against the ground. Raylan barely noticed it. The light, he understood, was just an illusion. It was a way of pretending. Now that he comprehended the truth of the world, he didn’t even need the light to see Boyd standing there beside him, white as a sheet, or to see the pebbles run down the walls like rain.

He closed his eyes and kept seeing all this anyway. What he felt was a strange species of exhilaration. They were going, and it would be better to die, he felt, than to live on having seen this and grasped that the world was shot through with it. That the darkness was not only alive but foundational. It licked away his terror and his worship and the piss that ran down his leg. The sound of the collapse echoed in his bones.

He reached out for Boyd’s hand, as he would do when he was thirty-eight and the darkness was on his doorstep again; he reached out and saved his life without even meaning to.

Because Boyd Crowder loved Raylan Givens, and he knew that about himself, and he took Raylan’s hand as a request— _save me_ —and not the gesture or confession of love that it was. Raylan had meant only: _It’s the end, and at least I’m with you._

But Boyd heard _Save me_ and started to run, and he took Raylan with him, dragged him back by the hand as the ceiling started to come down around them. Raylan was screaming, _howling_ , saying things he didn’t even understand, and Boyd just took them inexorably up, until at last Raylan gained his feet and ran with him.

Each step was a choice he was making. He could have been wrong, but at thirty-eight, he understood that he wasn’t. The darkness had wanted him and would have claimed him for its own if he had stayed with it, and whatever death had come then would have been a mercy compared to what would come at thirty-eight when he was the runaway, the prodigal, the rebel. He was always going to die in Harlan, but he could have had it quick and painless, if only he’d torn his hand out of Boyd’s and broken from him then and there.

With each step, he chose Boyd instead.

At thirty-eight, he realized that any _I love you_ he had said to Winona over the years, however deeply meant, was never as profound as that race out of the mine. Nothing, ever, had been the equal of that.

Outside the mine, there was chaos all around them, and people attempting frantic head-counts, and the ground around them was littered with dead flies. Boyd’s face was streaked with tears that had cut through the dust. His white of his left eye was still brilliantly red.

Raylan lied to him, said, “It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.” Boyd’s helmet had gotten knocked off somehow, and Raylan reached out to him and tangled his fingers in Boyd’s hair. The idea that someone might see him wasn’t in his mind at all. It seemed, right now, like such a stupid thing to be afraid of. “Come here.” He hugged Boyd hard. He thought about starting a life where Boyd was real and the darkness wasn’t, where Boyd was all that mattered, where _this_ was the only thing he needed—but even then, over Boyd’s shoulder, he could see a man with his back turned to them.

The man was walking backwards, slowly but perfectly, and getting closer. His black suit was silvery in places from dust. There was something a little wrong with the way his legs moved—like there was an extra joint somewhere. It nauseated Raylan, a little, and he squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his face against Boyd’s neck, smelling sweat and coal dust and _Boyd_.

“Raylan,” Boyd said. “There’s something—there’s a crack in the sky.”

“Close your eyes,” Raylan said. “Just don’t look at it.”

*

But it got harder and harder not to look. Boyd saw shadows everywhere, thrown by nothing, and he said they would move—walk on shuddery stilts, or crawl in lumpish, elbows-and-knees movements.

There was a tree Raylan saw, still green with summer, that cracked down the middle and hatched millions of long-legged spiders that were on him before he could try to unsee them. They laid opalescent eggs, warm and sticky, against his bare skin. He took a scalding hot shower and scrubbed himself until his hands started to bleed, and he tried not to listen to the _slurping_ sound the drain made as those thin tendrils of blood spiraled down into the darkness of the pipes.

He left his light on at night. It was exactly the kind of thing Arlo would have beaten the shit out of him for not so long ago, but he had the idea that he scared Arlo these days. He’d lost weight—everything he put in his mouth tasted like ashes and sawdust—but when he looked in the mirror, he saw a sort of razor-sharpness to himself that matched the increasing disconnection in his eyes. He didn’t look like he’d take a beating anymore. He didn’t look like he’d only throw a punch back, either—he looked like he’d kill.

People started to avoid him.

“Fuck them,” Boyd said with uncharacteristic brevity. “If it gives you any relief, they show no more willingness to share _my_ company.”

And Boyd did look— _haggard_. Too many sleepless nights. It didn’t make much of a difference, though—when Raylan looked at him, it took effort to see the weariness in his face and the blood around his bitten-to-the-quick fingernails. He just kept on seeing Boyd. It was the way his mother hadn’t seen the weeds in her garden when she’d gotten too sick to tend to it. All she’d seen, towards the end, had been the flowers, and she’d lain on the lawn-chair and skimmed her fingers over the silky blossoms. _Beautiful_ , she’d said. _Beautiful_.

He took the bottle from Boyd and put another slug of Jim Beam down his throat; passed it back. They were sitting in the woods, which they’d decided was no more dangerous than anyplace else, and if Raylan looked—but he wasn’t looking—he could see the shadows hemming them in.

“I’ve been thinking,” Raylan said. “Maybe we should—”

And Boyd turned to him, smiling lazily, and put a hand on his cheek to pull him closer. “Don’t think, Raylan,” he said. “Now’s really not the time for that.”

Then Boyd kissed him. His mouth was warm and he tasted like whiskey, and he was right: there was nothing here Raylan needed to think about at all. He kissed Boyd back and Boyd moaned a little. The bottle slipped away from them and rolled across the ground, which Raylan thought seemed like a good strategy—he pushed Boyd a little and Boyd relaxed backwards, letting Raylan on top. Then it was a question of buttons and urgency, and the taste of Boyd’s mouth, because Raylan didn’t want to stop kissing him, but if he were kissing him, he couldn’t see to get Boyd’s fucking clothes off.

He was nineteen and he was thirty-eight and it was a quarter past midnight in Harlan, and all the shadows were out, but he didn’t give a damn about any of that. Just Boyd. Only Boyd. Always—at nineteen, this was what he stupidly thought—Boyd.

He kissed Boyd again, softer this time. “You know what I think? I think we’re both very drunk.”

“I’m not,” Boyd said, all sweet confidence. “If I was drunk, Raylan Givens, I wouldn’t be able to ravish you right here in these woods.”

“Oh, you’re going to ravish me, are you?” He brushed his lips and teeth against Boyd’s neck. The scent of his skin there was aftershave and sweat, entirely different than the girls Raylan had been with, but exciting all the same. He wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. What the fuck was the point? He felt like he’d loved Boyd Crowder for just about forever. “Why’d you kiss me, Boyd?”

“Because I wanted to, Raylan, from the very first time I saw you.” He smiled the smile that had made Raylan fall for him. “Wanted a lot of other things, too. Now, there comes a point where even I have to say that we have talked enough, and it’s time—”

A bruise, dark as eggplant, spread across Boyd’s cheek, and the lip that Raylan had bitten lightly only a moment before split down the middle, sending blood down Boyd’s chin.

Raylan drew back from him. “What the fuck?”

“Well, Raylan, where did you think we were going with this?” Boyd pushed himself up onto his elbows, wholly unconcerned with his newly broken teeth or the way his hair was flattening on one side, just at the temple, as if someone had a gun to his head. “If you’re suddenly feeling—tentative, I’ll admit to disappointment, but perhaps I could still… take care of you? For you do seem desperately in need of someone, at the moment.”

Not for much longer, he wouldn’t—Boyd looking beat to shit wasn’t likely to keep him hard. He touched Boyd’s lip at the split but his hand came away dry. Boyd was saying something, trying to ask him something, but it was like the world had gotten wrapped in cotton somehow. Not a word got through. The darkness slid between the two of them like a third, uninvited lover, and what it had of a hand, it put over Boyd’s mouth.

_This is what happens_ , the darkness said, like the sound inside the conch shell. Right against his ear. _Stay in Harlan, stay with him. This is what happens._

_Fuck you_ , Raylan thought, because he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. It was kissing him. It was the exact opposite of kissing Boyd. It was trying to take something from him, and it was cold as ice and dry as bone. Unlovely, as Boyd would say at thirty-eight about the roads in Harlan, and their brown-glass litter of broken bottles. No love at all.

_Fuck you, if that happens, I’ll kill them. Arlo, Bo, whoever tries. I will burn this fucking place to the ground for him if I have to._ He was brave. He was stupid. He was nineteen fucking years old, drunk, and head over heels in love. _I’ll burn you out._

“Fuck off,” he said, his voice raw, “and leave me alone.”

He closed his eyes to make the darkness disappear. He spit it from his mouth.

When he could see again, Boyd was gone, and the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam was laying on its side in the grass. Raylan picked it up by the neck and started home.

He had a headache and a sour taste in his mouth, and he thought, _I drank too much_ , and he wished like hell he could remember where Boyd had gotten to. He knew that Boyd had been there.

He took the top off the bottle and drank as he walked along, thinking about Boyd’s lips being there before his, and he ached in an unpleasant, blue-balled way that displeased him sorely. He wished he knew what the fuck had happened. Why Boyd had let him get so drunk, why Boyd had left him. Why Boyd had left the bottle—which was _Boyd’s_ —if Boyd were _going_ to leave him. His mouth felt swollen.

When he finally made it back to the house, Arlo was waiting for him on the porch.

“Where you been?”

“Out with Boyd,” Raylan said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go sleep this off and you can save the public service announcement bullshit for someone who actually gives a damn.”

“You’re gonna get that boy killed, you know,” Arlo said. “You can hide the way you are a little better—hell, maybe you’re only half as queer—but the way he looks at you, sooner or later, people are going to notice, and when they find out—well, you saw that, didn’t you? No wonder you needed a drink.” When he spoke, Raylan could see dead gray gums and the tip of a black tongue. “You’ll drink when they bury him. Why don’t you come inside, son?”

The wind that night was soft and warm, and the scent it carried to Raylan was one of decay. “You’re not Arlo.”

“I’m not? Then who the fuck am I?”

“You were in the mine.”

“I was,” the thing said, “and you pissed yourself.” It smiled its gray-and-black smile. “You were meant to stay. You wanted to stay.”

“You think talking to me through him’s going to win you any favors, you don’t know me very well.” His hands were sweating rivers, but he tried all the same to grip the neck of the bottle as tight as he could. If it came closer to him, he would swing for the fences. He didn’t know if that was really Arlo, put on the darkness like a rubber suit, or if it were one more thing he could maybe banish if he turned his head or closed his eyes, but he didn’t have enough love in his heart for Arlo to care either way.

“Raylan,” it said, “do you think you can surprise me? I know every thought that crosses your mind.”

“You didn’t know Boyd was going to run. You didn’t know you wouldn’t be able to stop us. We ran, and your fucking collapse didn’t do any good, did it? You want me to think you’re, what, some kind of god?” He went sing-song. “You’ve got the whole world in your hands?”

“I’m _Harlan’s god_ , you little shit,” it said, and Raylan knew then that it was Arlo, because it had lost the silky smoothness of its voice, and instead it just sounded like his daddy. It was Arlo’s body and enough of Arlo’s soul for Raylan to understand that Arlo had let it happen. Maybe he hadn’t realized what it wanted from him, but hell, maybe he had.

“I’m the god of your father who beat your mother. I’m the god of the coal mine. I’m the god of the bruises that wake you in the night and the whiskey you use to get back to sleep. I’m the god of black lung and miscarriage and that cancer in your Aunt Helen. I’m the cave-in and the company store. I’m _your_ god, Raylan Givens, because I’m all the home you have, and I always have been, and I always will be. And this is my home, my place.”

“You’re going to kill us because we saw you,” Raylan said. “That seems pretty chickenshit to me. For a god.”

“We always kill the things we love, Raylan,” it said. “You don’t know that yet, but you will. And we always love the things we kill. But it isn’t just killing. I’m going to swallow you whole. I’m going to have all of you, for all of time, and listen to you scream. You should never have run away from me, boy. You chose a harder path than you had to.”

“What did you do to Boyd?”

“Boyd’s home. Safe as houses. Maybe a little broken-hearted, thinking you done him wrong. You do remember now, don’t you? Your mind is such a slippery thing.”

He remembered the taste of whiskey on Boyd’s tongue. “If you touch him, I’ll—”

“ _I’ll fuck Boyd Crowder bloody if I want to_ ,” it said.

Raylan swung the bottle as hard as he could at its head.

The next few minutes were the most confusing of his life. Wherever he reached out, Arlo faded away from him like a ghost, only to come to him on the other side and knock the shit out of him, his hands as hard as granite. Raylan had taken beatings before, but never like this. When he could strike back and actually fucking hit something, it was like slamming his hand into a wall. There was no softness. No sign at all that he’d touched a human body, put it in some kind of distress. Meanwhile, blood was running from his nose like a faucet and the boot he took to the belly made it impossible, for several agonizing seconds, to get any air at all.

He lay gasping on the porch, breathless, feeling like he’d been beaten with a meat tenderizer. The darkness knelt down beside him and combed its fingers patiently, lovingly, through his hair.

“Raylan,” it said, “you want to live, don’t you? And you want Boyd to live? You do love him?”

The answer to all three questions was yes, but he was in too much pain to say it. That was fine—the darkness knew his thoughts. He had no reason anymore to doubt that. He didn’t even doubt that it loved him, as it defined love. Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in, and wasn’t that all it wanted? To take him in? There was blood trickling from his ear.

“And Boyd loves you, too. With all his heart.”

Raylan thought about Boyd. He wouldn’t mind dying while thinking about Boyd, if it came to that. Maybe even in the darkness, there would memories of Boyd. Harlan was his home too, after all.

“Give him up,” the darkness that was his father whispered. “Give him to me. And I’ll let you go. And I’ll let him live. Raylan. You don’t even remember what the light feels like, do you?”

_No_ —but he didn’t know whether meant that no, he wouldn’t give up Boyd, or no, he didn’t remember what the light felt like. He had kissed Boyd, he could think about kissing Boyd, he could do that and not listen, but there had been bruises on Boyd’s face and a gun at his head, blood running from his mouth with broken teeth, and the darkness was a caress against his cheek, his neck, telling him that that was the price he would pay for staying, for choosing Boyd. It said it was doing him the courtesy of pretending he hadn’t done it once already—chosen Boyd’s love over its, chosen Boyd over home, life over death.

_Maybe_ , it said, and it wasn’t using words now anymore than he was, wasn’t using Arlo’s borrowed voice, _maybe you’re just a runaway. You ran away once, you can run away again, and I’ll make up my mind that Boyd was never to blame. And none of the things you’ve seen will come to pass. And you, Raylan. The places you could go. The things you could be. The light you could have._

And he wanted the light. God, he did. He was starved for it. He didn’t remember the last time he’d seen a sun that hadn’t hatched spiders, like the tree, or turned into an eclipse that no one else could see. Sometimes not even Boyd.

The taste of whiskey and the scent of aftershave and Boyd’s smile. _I could save your life._

_(I could save mine.)_

It wasn’t like they had so much. They had kissed, that was all, and they never would have even done that if things had gone the way Raylan had wanted them to. He had always planned to leave Boyd Crowder and get the hell out of Harlan. Why did it matter so much now, that he had to be so dead-set against it? It could save his life. It could save Boyd’s life. Most of all, it would stop him from seeing all the things he didn’t want to see, whether it was the man walking backwards or the woman with the shroud or Boyd, so damned fucking inconvenient, looking up at him, with the shadow of the hickey Raylan had given him just underneath his jaw. He could have a life outside of Harlan. Outside the darkness that had always been his home.

_Don’t you want that, Raylan?_

He told the truth.

*

At thirty-eight, he couldn’t decide whether to forgive himself for that or not.

At nineteen, he was young, he was dying, and he was desperate. He thought, _It’s the only sensible choice_ , because at nineteen, he still believed in good sense, good choices. Work in the coal mine and save money so you can leave and not just get washed back up again. Avoid your daddy when he’s been drinking. Don’t fall in love with Boyd Crowder. And when offered the chance to live instead of die, to save your friend’s life, and to have a world that doesn’t look like a fucking Goya painting, say yes. You have to be hard to get anywhere in this world.

At thirty-eight, all he could think was, _But you loved him._

Yes, he did. And he knew that Boyd loved him. The canary in the cage, you put it there because you loved it, and it sang sweetly all the way down to die because it loved you, too. That was why it worked. It wouldn’t have been a sacrifice if no one had given anything up.

At thirty-eight, he thought, _But it lied. It tricked you. You didn’t save Boyd and you didn’t get away. It won. You let it win._

Home was where the heart was, and at thirty-eight, his heart had been in darkness for almost twenty years.


	9. exit strategy

**ix. exit strategy**

 

He woke up with someone dabbing water on his lips.

“Where are we?”

“My fucking house,” Ava said. She sounded like she’d been crying. She pressed the dishrag to his mouth again, but he pushed it away, even though the cool water felt like heaven. “You both been out of it for a long time. I was starting to think you wouldn’t come around again.”

Raylan could feel floorboards underneath the part of his back that wasn’t braced against Ava’s legs: he skimmed his fingers along the wood. His head was still throbbing badly enough that it seemed like it would just cave in if he turned it. “He kicked my head in. He… where’s Boyd? I can’t see Boyd.” And despite the pain he tried to lever himself up until Ava pushed him down again.

“Boyd’s fine enough for someone who ain’t speaking to either one of us.” She raised her voice. “ _Although I wish he’d come closer to the damned center of the room_. I can’t see the doors anymore, you know that? It’s like everything’s been wrapped in velvet. It doesn’t come near us, but—”

“But it won’t let us leave.”

“One of us should try,” Boyd said.

That time Raylan didn’t let Ava push him down again. The pain knifed through his head as he came upright, bracing himself against the leg of the kitchen table. Boyd wasn’t so far away—the darkness had caught them as neatly as Ava had said—but Raylan’s vision was blurry and he looked like a dream. Raylan reached out for him, but they weren’t close enough to touch. His fingers just swiped the air between them as Boyd refused to close the gap.

So Raylan said, “You know something? I tried to fuck a man in Miami that looked a little like you.”

“And how did that go for you, Raylan?”

“I was fairly drunk at the time. Couldn’t find my feet, so I doubt I could have found my dick if there’d been need of it, so not well, I’d have to say.” Boyd was beginning to look a little more solid around the edges. The hell of it was, Raylan had never in his entire life wanted him or anyone else so badly, and the timing of it couldn’t have been worse, what with Ava and the darkness and Boyd refusing to come near him and Raylan still feeling like moving would pose some severe difficulties. “The funny thing is, I didn’t even remember you then, not really. You were—you were someone I dreamed of, sometimes. I’d think, _Oh, Boyd—that’s right. We dug coal together_. And then you’d disappear.”

“Forgetting me shows an admirable pragmatism,” Boyd said. “I suppose that’s a constant thread through your nature, however, and not worth my being surprised.”

“You two can have your little lover’s quarrel a time when the world isn’t maybe ending, you think? And what the hell’s the matter, anyway?”

“Raylan and I were in the dark together,” Boyd said quietly. “Before it set us down here. And it showed us both a story.” He lurched up to his feet, looking nearly as wobbly as Raylan. “I’m going to try to get through. I do, and don’t scream, then I’d recommend you follow.”

“Yeah,” Raylan said, because if he took Boyd seriously right now, he’d have to shoot him just to stop him from inching any closer to the door none of them could see. “Because what you really want to do right now is have a bitch-fit and get yourself killed because you had a boyfriend who was a complete dick. Completely worth dying over, Boyd, you’re right. Ava and I, we’ll just hang back.”

“Do you have a better solution?” Boyd’s words were clipped, and he wasn’t looking at Raylan at all, but he wasn’t moving any closer to the darkness, either.

“Come and sit and wait to see if we’re all going to die.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t let either of you make plans,” Ava said. There was still enough of the kitchen left for her to get them a drink, so she came back with a bottle of bourbon and three glasses. “If we’re going to die, I for one am not going to do it sober. Sit down, Boyd, please.” She held the glass out to him and the light winked off it, just enough so that they knew there was still something in the world other than the darkness. “You don’t, you’ll break my heart.”

Slowly, as if it were painful for him, Boyd came back to them. Raylan didn’t touch him. He couldn’t think of a way in which it would be welcome or even forgivable. He just drank Boyd in.

He’d been afraid because loving Boyd could keep him in Harlan, because loving Boyd could get Boyd killed, because loving Boyd meant facing what he’d _done_ to Boyd, but in the end, no matter what he’d done to get away from the two of them in the woods that night, he was still in Harlan, Boyd was probably still going to die, and he’d been dragged through the mud of his own memories until he was filthy with them. Nothing had happened better or even differently because of what he hadn’t done.

The darkness had swept them from the road to the house and swept him all the way back to nineteen. Now it held them in the circle of its arms. Raylan no longer believed they could get away. Boyd’s God didn’t seem intent on saving them and the marshals weren’t going to break the door down. Ava had the best idea, putting her faith in good old Kentucky bourbon. Maybe a little moonshine if this stretched out much longer. All the good liquor of home to keep them warm and relaxed so they could die a little happier than they would have otherwise.

And Raylan wasn’t going to die not loving Boyd anymore than he was going to die sober. It was something else that could take the pain away.

It was good, at the end, to know who he was, and to not be afraid anymore.

Ava poured. They all sat down at the kitchen table.

“I suppose it’ll be Bowman,” she said.

“That crossed my mind.” Raylan let the drink burn its way down his throat. “It was Arlo who came to kill me before. I guess the good news for you is that it might use Bowman up, just like it did Arlo. Heart attack two days later.”

“You weren’t of a mind to come back for the funeral,” Boyd said. He spun the glass idly on the table. He’d left a thumbprint on the lip of it and occasionally that would rock into view, drawing Raylan’s attention each time, which he supposed meant that he had it pretty bad. “Seeing how things ended between the two of you, I suppose I can’t blame you for that.” And if he emphasized the _that_ a little, twisting it like a knife, it was probably fair. All the same, though, he didn’t want this to be how things ended between the two of _them_.

“I didn’t even know about it then,” Raylan said honestly. “It took me longer than that to get settled, get a fixed address so Helen could write me. Didn’t figure there was much point coming back to visit a gravestone I’d been seeing since I was a kid anyhow.”

“Well, I left flowers there the one time and pissed there the other. I never was quite sure how you felt about your daddy.” He drank and held his glass out wordlessly to Ava, who filled it up again. He took her hand and looked down at it for a second before raising it to his lips.

“If you’re doing that to keep from kissing Raylan,” she said, “I’m not going to take kindly to it.”

“I’m doing it by way of an apology. I knew what was going on in this house, what Bowman was and is, and I allowed myself to be distracted from stopping it.”

“Well,” she said, “I did appreciate you always waiting till I was outside the house before you tried to set it on fire.”

“I’d like to be family to you, before the end.”

She leaned across the kitchen table and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s fine by me, Boyd.”

Evidently everyone was gonna get kissed but him. Raylan took Boyd’s glass and drank his bourbon, which was easier than pouring for himself, and sort of like a kiss. He appreciated the symmetry, anyhow, since he’d only just remembered sipping Jim Beam and trying to taste Boyd’s mouth on the mouth of the bottle. Boyd looked at him. If he had seen everything Raylan had seen, and understood it all, then he knew this, too. And if he could get a glimpse of Raylan’s heart and mind, the way he’d done before, then there wasn’t anything else that needed saying.

Raylan didn’t think Hallmark had captured the _sorry I kissed you and then traded your life for mine and then forgot about it_ market yet. Words wouldn’t do anything for him.

Finally, Boyd said, “Did I tell you I like the hat?”

“You mentioned it.” He took it off and turned it around and around, looking at the brim. It had been with him for a long time. “You want it?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just leaned forward and settled it down gently on Boyd’s head. Boyd touched it as if he weren’t sure whether or not it would burn him.

“There,” Raylan said. He couldn’t stop looking. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

*

Between the three of them, it didn’t take long to finish off the bottle. Raylan took the worst of it. He leaned back in his chair, staring through half-lidded eyes at Boyd, so loose and so easy, running his fingertip around the rim of the bottle to get the last drop. Raylan extended his legs and brushed his foot against Boyd’s. “Hey. How come you and Ava aren’t drunk?”

Boyd at least laughed. “That’s a fortitude only comes from staying in Kentucky. You been gone too long, Raylan. Though had you not kept stealing my glass, you likely would have fared better.”

“I like stealing yours,” Raylan said stubbornly.

“But it does make Boyd only ‘bout half as drunk as you,” Ava said.

“What about you, then? I didn’t take yours.”

“I just hold my liquor better than the both of you. Comes of being married to Bowman.”

“He is taking his sweet time coming to kill us,” Raylan said. He squinted at his watch but couldn’t make it out. “Boyd. You think I need glasses?”

“I think you would look very good in glasses, Raylan, but no. I think you’re drunk.”

“Funny to think of darkness having scheduling difficulties. Wanting to make arrangements with Bowman to usher us from this world to the next but not being able to get him here in a timely fashion.” He ran his foot up Boyd’s leg. He’d kicked his boots off some time back—he didn’t remember exactly when—and the texture of Boyd’s jeans, the warmth of Boyd’s skin underneath, was delicious. He felt like a cat winding between someone’s feet. “It picked us up and put us down again, after all. And we’re a surly, unpleasant bunch.”

“But we know it. If you know you’re on an airplane, you are not surprised by the takeoff, however sick it makes you to fly. But for the ground to come away beneath your feet, for the truth of your reality to be revealed—you said yourself that it killed your daddy.”

“He gave into it,” Raylan said. It was like a stone in his mind. He couldn’t think his way around it to forgive. “You saw, didn’t you? That he didn’t care. That he let it.”

Boyd reached down, closed his hand lightly over Raylan’s ankle. “I saw. All the same, in the end, what he did, or what he let it do, Raylan, that destroyed him. Whatever he invited in, he couldn’t sustain it, not when he understood its true nature.”

“I’m supposed to find that a comfort.”

“We forgive, and so are forgiven.”

He listened to what Boyd wasn’t saying about darkness and the people who entered into contract with it, hurting those they loved or should have loved, and he put his foot back down on the floor. We forgive, and so are forgiven. We can forgive, _because_ we are forgiven. Boyd saying that he would look good in glasses. Boyd’s hand, warm against his ankle. Careless Boyd Crowder, always talking him into a kind of love that wasn’t sensible, and might just break his heart besides. Nothing was ever fucking easy.

“It’s a point,” Raylan said, unwilling to say whether it was a good one or not. He’d prefer to devote his last hours to thinking about how Boyd looked in his hat rather than pondering the intricacies of love and forgiveness. He doubted he could make those lights bright enough to burn through the darkness anyway, not in whatever time they had left. Not if just loving Boyd like he did, and Ava like he was coming to, and them loving him back hadn’t already made them a door.

“It’s a consolation and a gift, not an exit strategy,” Boyd said.

Raylan pointed at him. “Don’t do that. It’s—unseemly, talking back to something someone hasn’t even said. Untoward.”

“ _Untoward_ would be the two of you screwing on my kitchen table,” Ava said. She lit a cigarette. “Which you seem no little ways away from doing.”

“Well,” Raylan said, aimlessly determined to prove a point that he wasn’t especially clear on, “if there’s going to be some Crowder here and one of us screwing him, I think it’s best it be Boyd.”

“I didn’t say it’d be undesirable for you,” Ava said. “Just untoward.”

“That is a clarifying use of language,” Boyd said. “So many desirable things—”

Raylan hadn’t thought particularly about whether or not the darkness around them had cut off sound as well as light—it had been so quiet all the time that he’d just taken for granted that they were locked inside some velvet-lined coffin all their own. But now he heard the old creak of the screen door, and his hand dropped immediately to his side. He didn’t know if a bullet would stop Bowman when his fists hadn’t even left Arlo bruised, but he could sure as shit try, and die that way. It wasn’t like he was long on options.

All three of them, it seemed, were of a mind on that: Ava picked up a butcher’s knife, angling it out, and Boyd drew his own piece from its place at the small of his back. He was praying, too, his lips shaping words Raylan couldn’t hear. Then he sort of made out— _valley of the shadow_ —which seemed fitting enough, everything considered.

He finished and looked over at Raylan looking at him. He was, Raylan thought, so fucking beautiful. And wearing Raylan’s hat.

And if the bargain had worked, if Raylan had lived the rest of his life away from Harlan in some kind of unearned peace, he would never have seen Boyd Crowder wearing his hat, and that would have been a damned shame. No kind of way to live.

They aimed together at the darkness. Couldn’t be sure of where the door was, even with Ava to guide them, but when Bowman came through, they would just have to hope that they’d be good enough, and quick enough, to change direction if they had to.

He couldn’t turn his head to look at Boyd—it wasn’t fair to any of them to take that risk—but he said, “Hey, Boyd, you didn’t see Lefors out there, did you?”

“You do remember they died at the end of the film, Raylan,” Boyd said.

“Shit. You’re right.”

He listened for footsteps and heard them, distantly: he dropped his voice low. “Well, Ava, she has a shot. Etta Place lived.”

“Etta Place lived because she left Butch and Sundance before the Bolivian Army got there,” Ava said. “And I can’t believe that this is what you want your last words to be, Raylan Givens.”

“I considered other things, but they all felt a little forced.”

He didn’t mention his worry that they wouldn’t be his last words. He tried to keep believing that what was coming to them through the darkness was only Bowman Crowder, with or without spiders crawling under the gelid whites of his eyes, but he didn’t have the faith that Ava had.

Whatever she had seen over the years with Bowman or in the last day with him and Boyd, she still hadn’t come face-to-face with what had made its home in the mine. The so-called god of Harlan and the miscarriage the bourbon had eased her into confessing. The god of Harlan and the welts on her thighs from Bowman’s belt. All she had seen had been its works. No, if Bowman were coming for them, it was as prelude to something worse, he was sure of that much. Why tease them over all those years just to devour them all at once? Why let its henchman do its bidding?

The truth he knew in his heart—the truth that came from knowing the darkness better than even Boyd did—was that Bowman Crowder was coming, but not for them. Just for Ava.

He hadn’t chased her, because he wasn’t that kind of man, so the darkness had brought her back to him as neatly as it had brought Raylan back to Harlan.

Home was the place where you always returned, sooner or later, when the rest of the ground fell away beneath your feet, and your life swept you away like a hurricane.

He and Boyd were just there to watch, and to do what they had done at nineteen: bear witness to it.

She should have left them.

If it came to it, if he had to, he would do for her what he would do for Boyd, to save them from misery. What he would do for himself, after, if there proved to be time.

He would aim for their hearts.


	10. never smile like that again

**x. never smile like that again**

 

What mattered about the quick draw was the memory of having done it a thousand times before. The hand was faster than the mind. Raylan did not recall ever in his life having thought, _And now I will reach, pull, aim, and shoot_. He did not believe, necessarily, that sex equaled death, though he’d once seen an abstract sculpture to that effect, but he did know that in either case, only amateurs thought too closely about the mechanics during the act itself.

What mattered was speed and accuracy; in his line of work, one didn’t mean shit without the other.

Of the two, though, Raylan had always valued speed.

That was why, when Art Mullen came through the darkness, Raylan actually put pressure on the trigger before he could stop himself. When he eased back, he felt how little movement and instinct had separated him from the kill shot, and he couldn’t get his hands steady. He hadn’t seen. The darkness like a curtain or a wall, and he hadn’t seen.

Art said, “For a second there, Raylan, I thought you were going to shoot me,” and his voice was so level that Raylan didn’t doubt for a second that Art knew how close he’d come.

“I have never yet pulled a trigger I didn’t mean to,” Raylan said, but the boast was like salt on a wound. He still couldn’t calm his hands. He holstered.

“I’d ask if you heard me calling, but I don’t think I have to.”

The hell of it was, Raylan could still see the darkness curled around them like a cat, smugly sleeping, and while Raylan didn’t know if it had always been its plan to have him shoot Art or if it had been pure improvisation—if they could still count on Bowman Crowder to make an appearance before the night was done—he knew why he hadn’t heard Art saying his name or telling him to put the gun down. It had taken so long for that creak at the front door to progress to the kitchen. Art must have spent some time talking himself hoarse, looking into a brightly lit kitchen that he could see perfectly, and the three people standing in it, armed and scared to death. All his words falling on deaf ears.

Until he had just walked in. Monuments had been built to men for doing less than that.

“I see you found Boyd Crowder,” Art said. He spared Boyd a nod. “And didn’t progress much further with your rescue of Ms. Crowder. Ma’am.”

Ava nodded but didn’t let go of the knife.

Boyd, who’d at least met Art before, had lowered his piece, but Raylan didn’t trust him to not raise it again if he felt he needed to: it made him antsy seeing it still in Boyd’s hands at all. Boyd caught his eye and said, “Raylan, he doesn’t see it.”

“I don’t see what? What the hell is going on here? I call and call, no one answers, you call back and say that you waited out the storm and you’re with Ava, and haven’t seen hide nor hair of Boyd, but you’re on your way back for a round of drinks and a hotel room and then _you fucking disappear again_. My God, Raylan.” Art passed a hand over his face. “I talked to Winona about you, before you got reassigned here. She said I should be careful. That you were good at your job, but you had no business being in Kentucky.”

Raylan, to his surprise, made some kind of strange barking sound that might have been a laugh or the beginning of something else. “I won’t argue with her on that.”

“Until you start making sense and offering some explanations, I’m not going to call the series of sentences you’re coming up with actual talking.” Art pulled out the last of the kitchen chairs and sat down with his back to the darkness at the door. It made Raylan’s skin crawl.

He, Boyd, and Ava had all hooked themselves into a horseshoe, pointed the other way.

“Explanations are generally not an issue,” Boyd said. “They tend to be too colorful.”

Art ignored him. “Raylan, when we were at Glynco, you seemed like a man who had himself together. A little skittish sometimes, but not apt to do the kind of chicken-with-its-head-cut-off bullshit you’ve been doing all day today.”

“Now may not be the time for storytelling,” Ava said. She looked between Raylan and the darkness, eyebrows raised. He knew what she meant, but there was nothing else to do: no lie to cover this would have made more sense than the truth, sad as that was. He shook his head.

Standing up while Art was sitting made Raylan feel like a kid reciting a poem for school.

“ _It is an ancient mariner_ ,” Boyd said softly, “ _and he stoppeth one of three_.”

“Untoward,” Raylan said.

Boyd glanced over. He had that wry spark back in his eyes, now that they were free from danger for a spell—he couldn’t ease into how quickly Boyd could move in and out of terror. He didn’t like that Boyd could do it because he’d spent half his life learning how.

“ _Had we but world enough, and time_ ,” Boyd said.

“Boyd’s in love with Raylan,” Ava said. She swept her feet up so her heels were on the seat of the chair with her and hugged her knees like a child. He supposed it was fair to disclose it so plainly, since he would have gotten to it at some point, and they were past any ordinary sort of social contract by now. “Raylan loves him back, though apparently there have been complications on that score. Should you be looking for a beginning.”

“What with the poetry and Boyd wearing Raylan’s hat like it’s his letterman’s jacket, I was starting to think something along those lines, but all of that’s something I’d rather hear from Raylan if he can get his mouth unstuck.”

“The day the mine collapsed,” Raylan said, and then he told it all, from the darkness to the kiss, from Arlo to Tommy Bucks, from that morning until then. Three chapters of his life. He made shorter work of it—and said less about Boyd’s eyes—than he would have expected. All the while, he couldn’t read Art’s face. He ended with, “And then I almost shot you, thinking you were Bowman.”

“As I’d hate to die in Bowman Crowder’s place, I’m glad you didn’t.” Art hadn’t said he believed him—he hadn’t said much of anything—but he had scraped his chair a little against the floor, and it was his shoulder towards the darkness of the door now, not his back. “You believe all this, don’t you.”

Raylan answered the question the only way he could: he held up his hands so the sleeves would fall back a little, and he showed Art the cuts he’d made on his wrists.

“All three of you,” Art said. “See, here I have a problem, because any one of you, on your own, would just be batshit insane. Boyd Crowder’s been known to be that for years, preaching against the darkness up in his church with crosses carved on his hands, talking about people with no eyes following him down the street. And Ava Crowder, on her own, well, abused wife, suffering, invents a fantasy about it being the house as much as her husband that’s got her tied to her situation.”

Ava gave a small half-smile, like, _What can you do?_ Like she was tired all the way down to the bone over the house and no longer cared.

“And Raylan Givens. Lawman with a reputation for being a little too quick on the draw and, his very sincere ex-wife says, afflicted with a history of mental instability and delusions revolving around Harlan. Now, Raylan, you I can tie to Boyd, on account of the two you growing up together: I can say that’s a shared delusion. Two boys in Harlan, in love with each other, with every right to suspect their friends and families would be less than understanding—they invent a story where it’s them against the world.”

“No,” Raylan said. “It wasn’t like that.” He could see how it could have been, but it wasn’t, and he had to believe that.

“Because Ava throws it out of balance, and frankly, she strikes me as the best-balanced of the three of you right now. Unless we say that you and Boyd are so damned charismatic, she just couldn’t keep herself from drinking the Kool-Aid, we have a problem.”

“Raylan _is_ charismatic,” Boyd said.

“Just because I talked you into too much of Mags’s apple pie—and that ain’t even the point you want to be making right now, Boyd.”

“Hence why I doubt the two of you could convince anyone of anything,” Art said dryly.

Raylan thought, _Wait_. What he snagged on wasn’t the implication that Art was giving in, strangely enough, but Boyd, who was charismatic in truth—who even according to Art had drawn followers in like flies to honey. Boyd had played the situation like the prettiest of tunes, going for that mulish, dreamy-eyed stupidity just to lead them all down the garden path. It unsettled him. He supposed he’d had ample time, over the years, to romanticize Boyd and forget that he had to be careful of him. They were still in the holler, after all, and a Crowder was a Crowder.

“Then you do believe us,” Ava said.

“Let’s say I’m refraining from judgment, and that I think it’s best we get the hell out of Harlan.”

Art stood up: Raylan remembered again that he was a thicker man, wide-shouldered. Like Bowman, blocking the door to the house, sneering about how Boyd had been sweet on him; like Art, cracking a hand as heavy as stone across Raylan’s cheek. There was a sourness on his tongue. He’d had medication before that made him this way, sleepy-headed and bitter in the mouth, and he didn’t like the memory of it—lying stoned out of his skull in a Nicaraguan hospital bed with some TV playing dubbed sitcoms on endless loop—any better than he liked the feeling now.

In Nicaragua, Tommy Bucks was taping a man’s mouth shut around a stick of dynamite, and here he was, for some ungodly reason, in a house in Harlan with Boyd Crowder, who might make up his mind to do the same thing. He’d always liked the sparkle of the fuse. Sometimes he’d hang around, a little open-mouthed, big-eyed, watching it burn. Fuck, with Boyd’s tendency to set things on fire and Raylan’s own uncomfortable bouts of pissing in his bed as a kid, they made two-thirds of a budding serial killer, and they wanted to go to bed together?

“We can’t make it out through the darkness anyway,” Boyd said. He was looking at Raylan strangely, and Raylan thought, _Fuck off out of my head_. “You only made it in because you couldn’t see it. You could leave, the way Ava could have, but not the rest of us.”

“What would happen?”

Boyd smiled that remorseless smile of his. Raylan couldn’t believe he ever wanted to kiss it off his mouth, except he still did. Only he didn’t want to taste Boyd, or even kiss him hard enough to get Boyd breathless for him. He wanted something _more_ than that. He thought, _I could make you never smile like that again._

Because Boyd was a liar. Raylan couldn’t think around that. His head the way it was, full of painkillers and the loud and poorly accented English of the dub and the canned laughter, he couldn’t think around anything at all.

Boyd _forgiving_ him, and preaching forgiveness, like Raylan had done wrong in _just fucking saving his life._

Raylan said, “He doesn’t have a damn clue what would happen. He just likes pretending that he knows. If he knew anything about it, he wouldn’t still be here.” There was something the matter with him: his breath was coming too quickly, and there was something about his hat that he wanted to remember but couldn’t. “He’s fucking delusional.”

Ava took a step back from him.

“And you’re on his side all of a sudden,” he said scornfully to her. “Oh, Boyd’s crazy, Boyd spooks when the wind turns, until he’s getting you away from your fuckwit husband, and then he’s your brother.”

“You’re being an asshole,” Art said.

Raylan grabbed onto his hair like he had to hold his head still. “ _None of you are fucking real_.” If he could say it calmly enough, then it would be true, and the world would stop hurting. “I’m not here.” Or if he was, then they were all part and parcel with the darkness. He couldn’t even see their eyes: like they were all behind thick, glazed glass. He should have pulled the trigger. “I’m in—I’m in Nicaragua.” He could hear the dull chirp of the heart monitor.

“You aren’t in Nicaragua or any other place,” Ava said. “However much you want to be. I _know_ this house, Raylan. I know what it does to you.” She had gone away, but now she inched closer to him, delicate in her steps like a fawn.

Behind her, Boyd had pressed his hands to his eyes, as if they were burning him, like he’d been staring too long into the sun. The smile had gone off him.

 _Nicaragua_ , where the darkness had been flung with the blood and brains out of that man’s skull when the fuse had burned down between his lips and the spark not been smothered by spittle and snot from his panicky cries, humming like wasps through that closed mouth, those tight white teeth. Raylan could follow a trail through his life and find darkness anywhere, so why did he think he’d come back to Harlan, except that it told him so? Back to Boyd Crowder and the ache of that guilt and old love, back to play hero to Ava, back to have Art understand him, reach out a hand and save him the way Arlo had never been able to—no. That wasn’t real, any of it. The way he’d matched his thumbprints on the bourbon glass to Boyd’s—it couldn’t have been.

“It comes in wherever you lay out the welcome mat,” Ava said. She was close enough now to lay a hand across his arm. “And worry’s a good one. But it can’t lie about everything, Raylan, and it doesn’t know what good is. It doesn’t—if we weren’t real, then you wouldn’t have thought of Miami, and that ice cream truck, and you wouldn’t have made up with Boyd. It ain’t wishful thinking it likes. It’s the worst things.”

“I don’t like the way he still has that pistol on him,” Art said in a low voice, probably to Boyd, and well, there they were on the shadow side of things again—Art confiding and placing his trust in Boyd Crowder, local lunatic. The boy Raylan had loved, he would have grown up to be somebody else.

It was always, always the damned darkness that paid for the light. Boyd had been suffocated by it for Raylan’s sake and now Raylan was drowning in it for Boyd’s, for Ava’s, so they could crawl to shore on the rocks of his broken reputation, his busted mind and heart, whatever was left of him that was solid and easy to hold onto.

 _There’s a way out of here_ , he thought, and he wasn’t sure if the _here_ that he meant was the hospital room in Nicaragua or Ava Crowder’s dark-lined kitchen or the coal mine or Harlan or the whole fucking world.

It could be a lie. They could be a lie. He was dead in Nicaragua, his head blown apart by Tommy Bucks’s dynamite, and all this was some long dream in hell, where he saw what he wanted at the same time he saw he could never have it or keep it. But he still kept reaching out, his fingers just grazing against the surface. Boyd in the darkness, burning brightly as a star, his fingers eager against Raylan’s buttons, his mouth warm: and Raylan reached, each finger tense and shaky with longing, and missed. Had only ever kissed Boyd the one time. And all of this a trick of Harlan, to make him think it wouldn’t be so.

But if it wasn’t.

If Ava was right, the darkness couldn’t invent or even borrow the idea of forgiveness, of Boyd saying that he’d look good in glasses, had they but world enough and time. Of Ava saying that she deserved a little happiness, and walking barefoot out of her house to come after it. Of Art believing, or almost believing. Of, somewhere out of the scope of this little town and its limits, Tim and Rachel and Winona, and the possibility of elsewhere. Miami and the tropical drinks with the umbrellas in. The color that was the sand in the strongest possible sunlight.

If Ava was right, and he couldn’t have any of that if this weren’t real—if the lie was only the doubt of it—then Raylan knew how they’d leave, because the darkness had told him, somewhere long ago and far away. When he was nineteen, and desperately in love with Boyd Crowder.

If there was one thing Raylan Givens knew, it was how to make it out of Harlan alive.

“No,” Boyd said. His voice was shrill, and of everything that had happened to him in his whole life, that was what surprised Raylan most: Boyd’s voice going up like that. “No, Raylan, don’t.”

“There’s a joke,” Raylan said. He said it to Art and Ava because he couldn’t say it to Boyd: if he even looked at Boyd, he’d let Boyd make up his mind for him, because he would forget that Boyd was crazy, that Boyd had fallen headfirst into the delusion that everyone got forgiven just because of somebody else’s pain, that time would stretch like elastic to take them all in no matter how long it had been. “About a man who offered a woman a million dollars to go to bed with him. She said yes. Then he offered her a dollar. She said, what kind of woman do you think I am.”

“And he said, we’ve established what kind of woman you are, now we’re haggling over the price,” Art finished for him. “What’s that have to do with anything, Raylan?”

“I know what it is,” Raylan said. “Now all I have to do is figure out the price.”

He stepped into the darkness and away from Boyd’s hand that tried to close around his sleeve, a man dying of thirst reaching for cool sweet water, and Raylan, like the river, receded beneath him, and was gone.


	11. his misbegotten love story

**xi. his misbegotten love story**

“We can skip the spiel this time around,” Raylan said. “I lived through it twice. You’re god in Harlan, which must explain why things here have always been so everlastingly shitty. I understand. You’ve got no business looking like him.”

The darkness in Boyd’s skin was his Boyd reversed, even though every detail was correct. Raylan wanted to find differences, to say that this Boyd’s eyes were a shade darker or more opaque, shuttered against the light that had always thrummed out of Boyd like he was a generator running full, but it wasn’t so. This Boyd was Boyd down to the last hair of him, but he made Raylan’s skin gather up in gooseflesh like it wanted to creep from his bones.

“I always look like him to you,” the darkness said. “Boyd Crowder’s been your nightmare and your sweetest dream since you met him, Raylan. Don’t you know that?” It strokes his cheek and Raylan closes his eyes: its fingertips are like ants crawling across him. “You want to love him because you broke him, because you sold him, and you want to believe it could have been some other way. Do you think there’s a story where you took Boyd out of Harlan and the two of you ran away together? Do you think that’s your misbegotten love story?”

The ants crept along his hairline and through his eyelashes, put delicate feet against his closed eyes, against his closed lips. It was how the darkness kissed, but he hadn’t had to step into it to know that. He had known that for years.

“You’d have tired of him,” the darkness said, and then its voice pitched lower, fuller, in imitation of Boyd. “Gotten tired of me, Raylan, done with me, because I couldn’t lose my accent the way you did, thin it out like water into paint. Everybody would know what I was. And you saw the way I looked at you, you saw the way my eyes lit up when you walked into a room, Raylan, there’d be no use trying to hide the way we were. You’d be a faggot in every town you went to, because of me, and Raylan, you would have gotten tired of it, and you would have left me.”

It wanted him to say that all of that was shit. It wanted him to say that he would never have left Boyd Crowder, not Boyd, the love of his life, the one who had gotten under his skin—but all he could do was laugh. “Of course I would have left him. I left him already. You think you’re gonna put the fear of you into me, talking about how I might have done something I already did? He was the love of my life and I sold him to you for—for fucking penny candy, it seems like, for the chance to die a little later than I might’ve. You think talking about how I might have had a panic in some other life is going to just cut the heart out of me? I did worse than that already.”

The darkness takes its hand away and the ants turn to dust on Raylan’s skin. He opens his eyes. “Let’s talk about what I came here for, instead of about what I didn’t do with Boyd.”

The darkness looked like him, now: Raylan was more at home with that. He knew what he looked like when the lights were off inside his soul, after all. It said, “You were going to try to strike a bargain.”

“I figured you could take and take and take,” Raylan said, “but what you liked best was always what was given. You could have had me and Boyd anytime you wanted us, but you waited for me to give him to you, and you gave me time. It wasn’t a fair trade, especially not for Boyd, but it was a trade all the same. We haggle, you and me, and we come up with something.”

“You have nothing to give me this time, you puling, sanctimonious little shit.”

“You want me, though,” Raylan said calmly. “That’s why you wanted to look like Boyd and that’s why you wanted me to give him to you. You were jealous. I’m the one you wanted, the one you _want_ , the one you’re always reaching out to grab. You crawled into Miami to shoot Tommy Bucks through my finger on the trigger just to bring me home to you.”

“And you came.”

“And I came,” Raylan said, because there was no use in pretending that he’d had no choice. He could always have left, found an ice cream truck that needed driving; he could have spent the rest of his life eating Dreamsicles in Miami in a sunlight that tried its best to burn the shadows out of the world and he could have forgotten Boyd and Ava like he’d mostly forgotten Winona—he’d always been too damned good at leaving people behind. People and bodies. He could have met a woman or a man, someone with Winona’s eyes, Boyd’s smile, and he could have, he could have. Life was meant for starting over but Raylan belonged to the darkness, and he always had come home to it.

In the end, of course. And he knew that it was the end.

“Boyd lives,” he said. “Ava lives. Art lives. Shit—Winona and Tim and Rachel, and Helen, wherever she is, they all live. You don’t touch one of them. And you swallow me whole.”

“Boyd went insane from my breath on the back of his neck,” it said.

“I’m stronger than Boyd.”

“No,” it said, almost lovingly. “You’re not. You never were. And I could swallow you whole right now.”

“But you want me to say yes,” Raylan said. “Shit, I think maybe you need it, to take me. Not to kill me, but to come inside. Arlo would have said yes and Boyd wouldn’t have, Boyd carved the crosses into his hands to keep you from even trying, but look at who you had—Arlo and Bowman. And almost me, just now—but you had to trick me. No blackouts, no killing them without realizing it, you almost _fooled_ me, and that says you had to. You needed me to say yes and I’m saying it. If you hold up your end of the deal.”

The darkness had taken on not only Raylan’s flesh but his clothes, down to the hat he’d given to Boyd, and Raylan thought, _That’s not yours, either_ , but he only thought it about the hat. The rest of it, he’d given away a long time ago.

The trick was remembering that the darkness had given itself to him, too: if they’d fucked each other to fuck over Boyd, they’d shared the same disease for it. They were entangled. He was its and it was his, and both of them knew it— _And that_ , Raylan thought, _is my misbegotten love story_. The darkness with his eyes looking straight at him.

“Go on if you’re going,” Raylan said. “I don’t have all day for this.”

“Yes,” the darkness said patiently, “you do. You have forever.” And it stepped close to him, and—

And there was no longer any barrier between their skins or even between their bones. Raylan could feel its manufactured heartbeat and he understood, for the first time, that it was worse than he’d ever suspected before: all the spiders and shadows it had thrown against the surface of the light was so much hocus-pocus, bunny-eared hand figures moving on the wall, because the truth of it was an emptiness so hollow that even echoes died unheard inside it. It killed off any metaphor he’d give it, because whatever he said in place of its nothingness, whatever symbol he tried to impose on it—holes, caves, starless night skies, vacuums, tunnels, pits, hell—limited it and filled it. It had shown itself in those cracks in the world because that was the _bearable_ way to see it.

In its fumbling way, it had tried to seduce him. To be kind. There was no more of that: this was intimacy, what he and it had now, this was the darkness with its claws inside his head and his soul inside it. His soul the only thing inside it.

No wonder it had wanted him so badly, even more than he’d wanted Boyd or Winona or escape.

Raylan knew he couldn’t live for long inside it. Hell, he was probably already dead, or worse gone than Boyd Crowder had ever been, madder, no longer able to be human. What was left of him would erode away in the seconds that were millennia that were blinks of what was left of his eyes.

But the darkness had never been able to take without giving. _We have the same disease_. It was the demon in the coal mine with its sooty eyes kissing black lung down into the miners’ chests. It was the reason people in Harlan turned sideways from the aftermath of that sudden twister. It was Boyd’s way of knowing what people were thinking and of dreaming what hadn’t yet come. Nothing so immense could slouch to the holler to be born without shedding bits and pieces of itself, and since whoever took up those fractured bits of nothing couldn’t bear the emptiness, they took its inhumanity and flexed it, stretched it, shaped it, to the merely more-and-less-than-human. To the fleeting sense of danger. To the awareness of it. To Helen’s cancer and Boyd’s scarred hands.

To Raylan—especially to Raylan—and his habit of calling his memories into the world.

He thought about his other Harlan love story, the one that was lost but never misbegotten.

He thought about Boyd’s eyes, witch-hazel, and about Boyd saying that he’d wanted to kiss Raylan since the first time he saw him. He thought about Boyd selling licorice whips on a hot summer afternoon. He thought about Boyd in the church saying that he’d dreamed of him. About his lips on the imprint of Boyd’s on the whiskey glass, about Boyd in his hat, about Boyd saying, of the ghost Raylan had made of him, that there’d never been anyone in the world who looked like that.

And Raylan, who saw so clearly now, with nothing in the darkness to blind him, saw that that was true enough. The Boyd that he’d imagined was like a house in the winter with the lights warm and bright inside. That Boyd was an endless set of possibilities behind closed doors and some distance away, and it hadn’t been the real Boyd, not even before the darkness had crawled its way into their eyes and their lives.

The real Boyd was half-crazy, squatting in a derelict church, crosses carved into his hands to keep the darkness away. The real Boyd believed in forgiveness. The real Boyd had loved him and lost him and not chased after him, but gone overseas to blow shit up in the name of his country and come back because the darkness always did sing to him so sweetly. Because home was the place that wanted you and spread its arms to take you in.

The real Boyd, he thought. The one and only Boyd Crowder. The one he loved without even knowing, because he’d spent too long thinking the damned ghost was the truth of him—he called that image of Boyd into the heart of the darkness.

The real Boyd, and barefoot Ava, and Art, and Winona worrying over him, and Helen and his mother, and the ghost of his one good day with Arlo, when he’d tried to teach Raylan how to play poker. He took what was left of his love and his heart and gave it to the darkness.

Half a century ago, or thereabouts, back when Raylan had been somewhere and someone else, Boyd had said that he wasn’t sure what the light was or how it worked, how the crosses on his hands kept the darkness from eating away at him. Was it God? Was it just the symbol? Was it just the way the eye and the mind turned to look at _that_ instead of at the cracks in their shattered egg of a world? _So much of a gamble you’ve made, Raylan_ , Boyd whispered inside his head. _When you’ve never been anything but uncertain what to believe._

But Raylan thought, _I believe in the light._

And the darkness took it all in, and so was no longer darkness. Raylan was left in the heart of something else entirely, something gossamer-fine and shimmering, a room wreathed in starlight. It was too delicate to live like that on its own and so it collapsed around him, into him, and left what there was to leave behind on his skin like flour after sifting. Raylan had blinded it, loved it gone, lighted its way into becoming something else.

As he stepped forward out of that beautifully full nowhere that was still folding itself up into something as small as a flower, he felt something tight in his chest and throat that was maybe perilously close to what Boyd, who thought about such things, would have called grace.


	12. you were all light

**xii. you were all light**

He was back in Ava’s kitchen again. He had an instant to blink down at his hands, but there was no glow to him that he could see, and then Boyd pushed forward into him, a crash of sorts, his arms hard around Raylan to pull him close. Boyd smelled like sweat and bourbon and days of unwashed laundry, but Raylan couldn’t get his head into any kind of place necessary to care about that. He didn’t think he could have cared about anything in the world right then but the heat of Boyd against him, Boyd saying, “I felt it go, Raylan. Like it flew from my head on wings. What did you do?”

Raylan didn’t have the words for it, and Boyd, he knew just from looking, could no longer listen into him. He just shrugged uncomfortably. It was Boyd who could have put words to it, not him. “It couldn’t hold any light. It just—I bleached it out. All those ghosts it put in my head, I put in its,” except there was no head to it and the ghosts it had dreamed into him all his life weren’t the ghosts he had funneled into its emptiness. But it was close enough. He could see now that the story of it was a nail he would never be able to hit straight in—that was a lack of words and a lack of sentimentality and a lack of memory, for he was already bleeding it out like water from a sponge.

_I’ll get old_ , he thought, _and I’ll look from time to time at those scars on Boyd and wonder how he came by them._

Boyd would remember. Boyd had never been the one who forgot things, and even now he was looking at Raylan skeptically, not sure why Raylan couldn’t tell what needed telling, but then he gave it up and pressed his mouth to Raylan’s.

Raylan had had better kisses—less desperate ones, surely, and not so sloppy, kisses by people who had done more kissing than Boyd Crowder, who’d spent too long out of his mind—but then again, he lost all thought of that after a second or two of Boyd’s lips and teeth and tongue, his second kiss an improvement on the long-ago first, though they’d lost so much time in-between.

It was Art clearing his throat that got Raylan to pull away, though he kept his hands on Boyd’s shoulders, and didn’t know if he could have talked them into uncurling anyhow.

Art said, “The way I figure it, we cleared Boyd Crowder of shooting Jared Hale, on account of some reason I’ll clarify later in the paperwork. I’m not happy about that, but I don’t see any way around it. This is a situation without a good way clear, so I’m doing what I think’s right, but it might be best if you and I didn’t meet again for a little while.” He nodded at Boyd, who nodded back, his shoulders rigid underneath Raylan’s touch. Jared Hale, with spiders in his eyes, and if Raylan thought about it, he would guess that Hale wasn’t the only body Boyd had left behind over the years.

Though Raylan, too, came with his share of the dead.

“Ms. Crowder, so long as you’re fine with it, you can spend the night with me and my wife until we track down that husband of yours and give you a chance to file charges.”

“Fine,” Ava said. “I suppose I’ve slept in more dangerous places than a U. S. Marshal’s house most every night of my life.” She looked around the kitchen. “And it’s better now, but I’ve lost my taste for this house anyway.”

“Amen to that. And Raylan, it’s what, Tuesday? Well, you can either take the rest of the week off and show up on Monday or not show up at all. I like you, and I’ve missed you, and I guess I’m dumb enough to trust you even after seeing all this, but I hope you won’t take it personally if I say I won’t shed too many tears over seeing the last of you, that’s what you decide.” Art shrugged. “Not over you staying, either, though there’s going to be a rule in place about us never saying a damn word about any of this.”

Raylan couldn’t get his head around what he wanted, not now. There was so little he was sure of. He wouldn’t like to see the last of Art, but all the same, he really did feel like he could step away from pulled triggers and marshal stars and not regret it. It had been a way to deal with the fractured darkness, with his guilt, with everything else, and he didn’t know what kind of man he’d be without it, but he hadn’t had much time to think it over yet. At this moment, in Ava’s kitchen with Boyd poised like a top underneath his fingertips, he was a stranger to himself.

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime,” Art said, “I suggest we all get the fuck out of Harlan.”

Ava insisted on shoes, which Raylan was almost sorry for. The moment she put them on, he knew, she would walk away all on her own. She was the kind who could do that—walk away without running, leave without looking back. She came back wearing faded white canvas tennis shoes with red laces, a little splotch of color in the gloom. He looked at those feet in shoes like it was the end of a damned era. Soon enough, they’d all have to find a way to fit their lives back into more ordinary skins. He guessed that however it was going to all play out, they weren’t going to Miami to sell ice cream out of the back of a truck while Boyd recited poems and Ava walked barefoot in the chill of the built-in freezer. He’d believed in all the light because he’d had to, because there was nothing but the dark, but now there was just sunlight and low-wattage bulbs and ordinary shadows, usual lives.

He hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.

“You walked onto this porch and brought me out,” she said into his ear.

“You came,” he said.

“Only because you were there to come to. You remember that, Raylan,” and he could tell by the look on her face that she already felt it, too: the slipping away of everything that had happened. “You remember that you’re who people run to when they can’t stand the darkness, all right?” and she kissed him hard on the mouth, pure pressure, and then turned to Boyd with tears in her eyes. “You still crazy, Boyd? Or just crazy for him, now?”

Boyd skimmed his fingers across her cheek. “Oh, Ava. It’s been so long, I don’t think I can tell.” He kissed her, but lightly, on the forehead: Raylan had been right, then, to think Boyd didn’t know how much they all stood to lose. He would have kissed her better, else. “But one’s more certain than the other.”

“You gonna burn the house down?”

“Dammit,” Art said, “don’t the three of you talk about shit like that in front of me.”

“Perhaps for old time’s sake,” Boyd said. “And for you, if you’d like it. I never did get you a wedding present.”

“Arson later,” Raylan said. He touched the back of Boyd’s neck. There were things he wanted while he could still fathom the crosses on Boyd’s hands and the ghosts in his eyes and the years between them: he didn’t know where he would be in a week, or who he would be, but he would be there, and be that man, in Boyd Crowder’s company. They had spent too long apart. No more fucking waiting. He could already see the shape of the story he would have to learn to tell himself in the years to come: that he had left Harlan because he couldn’t stand the mine and he couldn’t stand Arlo, and that he’d come back to the town he’d hated and the boy he’d loved, and found both of them the same, found one was still willing to fuck him over and one was still willing to fuck, to hold, to not let go.

_And then we went back to my place and didn’t leave the bed for a good twenty-four hour stretch_ , he would say. _Some other shit went down that day, when we met up again, but I’ve forgotten it now._

“Arson later,” he said again. “I’m with Art. I don’t want to look around here much longer.”

“Raylan has things to do,” Art said dryly to Ava.

“And all of them are named Boyd Crowder.”

“I’m glad the two of you are going to be sharing a house for a day or so,” Raylan said. “The opportunities for these little remarks of yours.” He didn’t move his hand, though, and he felt Boyd’s skin warm further and further underneath his touch.

“Setting fires,” Boyd whispered.

_And_ , Raylan thought, _not putting them out_.

*

They came in through the door of his motel with Boyd pressed against it, Raylan’s key scraping against the lock with the sound of a tooth touching tinfoil, and Boyd’s eloquence devolving into murmurs and open-throated moans. Raylan wondered if he could still read minds, and if that would answer for how thorough the kiss was, how much in line, now, with what Raylan wanted from him. If Boyd took secret satisfaction from the way the key kept slipping away. But when they swung inside, Boyd falling backwards towards the bed, Raylan kicking the door closed again with his boot, he was on the brink of giving up such questions. Giving up thought altogether, actually. He had more important things to tend to.

“Long time, Raylan,” Boyd said, tugging off his shoes, tugging off everything, breaking buttons with a carelessness that Raylan was flattered by, since Boyd couldn’t have had much in the way of clothes. Raylan didn’t know if he meant it had been a long time for him or a long time for them or if he just wanted things to last a long time, but yes, all three, probably, and Raylan pressed his teeth against Boyd’s upper lip and fussed with his own clothes.

“Long time,” he agreed.

And a long way away, from those two boys in the dirt of the holler, with Boyd grinning up at him, and then—

But thinking, no, he wasn’t gonna do that anymore. Not now.

“What do you want?” Boyd said. “Tell me what you want, Raylan.”

“You don’t know?”

Boyd shook his head. “No more than anyone else. I think all that’s gone, Raylan. Everything’s gone but you.” He smiled. “So I have to ask and you have to say.”

“I don’t know that I can think,” Raylan said. He had the words for what he wanted somewhere in him, but—he didn’t know how Boyd had spent the last twenty years, but Raylan hadn’t done this, like this, since Boyd the first time around. He’d cut that part of his longing away as penance for his half-remembered sin and now Boyd wanted him to spell out all he’d dreamed of more than thought of, all he’d never done, not in this exact configuration. Anyhow, words were overrated.

He moved to kiss Boyd again, to put his hand down against Boyd’s fly, and Boyd pushed hard against him, pushed him down, flat on the bed. Not what Raylan would have thought of him, but—

The gunshot came in later, like an echo of itself.

To roll over, to drag Boyd off the bed with him, to pull from the holster he was still wearing, to fire, to hit what he was aiming just a split second after jogging his elbow against the floor—that was the work of long years of careful thoughtlessness honed sharp and fine as a razor blade.

It was Bowman Crowder— _had_ been Bowman Crowder, he corrected himself a little dispassionately, not caring overmuch about the heart’s blood of the man that he’d splattered across his shirt front. Bowman Crowder, waiting out the hours in the cramped darkness of Raylan’s closet, some forgotten, stale pocket of what had been and probably always would be, somehow, somewhere. What would slowly come back into the world. Once it forgot about his love.

It had used Bowman like a wind-up toy soldier, had talked to him about his queer brother and the federal who had stolen his wife, and it had put him away from Harlan, where he would be safe, at least for a little longer. There were blood-red scratches on his face, near his eyes, like something had climbed out of them, or tried to. His eyes, still open, were Boyd’s eyes.

Boyd. Raylan turned to him and rolled him over. He’d left Boyd with his face pressed down on the floor, which wouldn’t do, not at all.

He never doubted that Boyd would be breathing. Boyd had survived in the heart of Harlan County with the darkness cutting roads through his head and heart: a bullet seemed too small, too insignificant, to put a period to a man like that. And Boyd was breathing, still, so for a moment, Raylan could let himself be fooled.

But there was a froth of blood against Boyd’s lips and a rattle in his chest.

All that came out of Raylan’s mouth was some desperate rasp, wordless: he didn’t have whatever language it would have taken to say what it was to watch Boyd dying in front of him. He pressed his hands to Boyd’s chest. An empty gesture. Raylan knew what it looked like when someone shot to kill, and even if Bowman hadn’t been as a good a shot as him, he’d been close. He hadn’t saved his brother’s life through stupidity and shitty aim, he’d only left it so Boyd would spend his last little bit of time gasping for air and knowing he wouldn’t get it.

Boyd reached out for Raylan’s hand and caught it. His fingers were already lukewarm. Raylan pressed them against his mouth, between his lips, the taste of Boyd the taste of dirt and fresh blood.

“It was here,” Boyd said. His pupils were dilated: darkness swallowing him up, licking the salt from his skin at last. “You came and called me home. It’s always you, coming out of the black.”

_No_ , he almost said, _that was your brother_ , but saying it would have meant letting go of Boyd’s hand, relinquishing this last touch, this last point of commonality with the darkness, the way they wanted, more than anything, to press Boyd in and keep him close, to taste him, to hold him. He had undone the emptiness of its heart, but this one thing, this scrap of it in his closet, this fingernail clipping, this _leftover_ , had undone him. Boyd had said there wasn’t anything left, but Boyd had been wrong, and he was living to know it. Even if it would be only for another few seconds.

“Warm,” Boyd said, meaning Raylan’s mouth, and Raylan smiled around Boyd’s fingers.

_Everything’s gone but you_ , Boyd had said.

_You were all light, and you drove out all the darkness of the world_ —and that had been Boyd the madman, Boyd the liar, Boyd standing in a church recounting the dream that had led him back to Harlan. _You told me not to be afraid to come back to Harlan._

_Everything’s gone but you._

Something white-hot and impossible unfolded in Raylan’s mind, something too wild to recognize as hope. He let Boyd’s hand go and leaned forward instead, pressing his fingertips, splayed out, against the hot circle of blood just to one side of Boyd’s heart. He thought about things left behind. Scars. Angry men. And him—caught up so closely with the darkness, once upon a time, that he could still feel its love-bites on his skin. Whatever he was, whatever it had made him, he was that still.

“You’re dreaming, Boyd,” he said. His eyes were burning. “It’s all right, now. It’s fine. Don’t be scared.” He pressed harder against Boyd’s chest and Boyd gasped. “You breathe, dammit, you breathe and you come back, you come back to me.”

“You came back,” Boyd whispered.

Raylan didn’t know if he was repeating Raylan, too confused by blood loss now to tell the difference, or if he were just losing bits and pieces of his memory after all, here at the end, but he didn’t care. He held on savagely. He’d crush Boyd’s chest if he had to. He was _entitled_ to this, he was _owed_ , it was his scar, it was his leftover, it was the detritus he had forgotten to sweep away and out of himself, and he needed it, please, he needed it more than the darkness, which didn’t love, had ever needed Bowman. He was vaguely aware that light was splitting his head in two. His hands were gloved in it.

_Do they work?_ he’d asked of Boyd’s crosses. And Boyd had said yes, but they burned.

Raylan understood that now.

“I came back,” Raylan said. “I followed you. Always a step behind you, dammit, but you dragged me, the way you dragged me out of the mine. You come back, Boyd. We stopped it, it’s over, we brought the light, you and me and Ava, and you have to come back, because otherwise—” He kissed Boyd then, and it was brutal, like trying to screw his mouth onto Boyd’s like a jar top, because whatever he needed to say then was in that language that he still didn’t know. Without Boyd, he would lose the habit of believing in the light. He would call the darkness back into the world, piece by piece: slip it in through the cracks of his heart.

He closed his eyes as his hands started to cool. He felt emptied out.

_If he’s dead_ , he thought, _I won’t let it come in._

He would count to ten as slowly as he could, and then, he wouldn’t look at what was left of Boyd. He would take the gun that was still beside him and slip it into his mouth. He would put an end to the whole fucking story of Raylan and Boyd.

He got to seven before Boyd said, “I dreamed—”


	13. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all of you for reading, and again, thanks to norgbelulah and Thornfield Girl for their help. You're all wonderful people.
> 
> Also, there's one more chance to play "spot the homage to _IT_." Get it while the getting's good. :-)

**epilogue.**

 

The house in Key West was nearly all windows and doors. It took almost all of Raylan’s savings to pay for that kind of light.

Boyd preached to the kind of congregation that would come in hungover and not mind their minister wearing another man’s ring around his finger.

The rings were from a pawnshop in Lexington, bought the day they’d flown out, and no proposals had ever been made, no vows ever said. Raylan had left them on the dresser their first night in the new house and Boyd had been wearing his in the morning, so Raylan put one on, too: it seemed right. Sometimes the gold caught the light and held it.

Raylan worked for locals who didn’t understand why he’d want a pay-cut, but were happy to let him spend his time rousting drunks and protecting tourists. He took the occasional odd night as a bouncer. There was something in his eyes that made people not want to fuck with him.

They got by.

A month after the move, a letter came from one of the Lexington marshals that Raylan had liked but could now barely remember. It was short and to the point: wished him well, apologized for calling his “boyfriend” crazy, and said that given everything that had happened with the storm and Bowman Crowder, he understood well enough why Raylan hadn’t wanted to stay. “Things can be hard to live with, sometimes.” The woman, Rachel, had signed her name, too. Art hadn’t.

There were the things you lost, Raylan supposed, and the things you kept. He didn’t write back, but he saved the letter all the same.

“They seem friendly enough for lawmen,” Boyd said. “And you haven’t so many attachments in this world, Raylan, that you can afford to be choosy.”

But Raylan shook his head. “I thought one time they’d be useful for seeing which was the wind was blowing. Because they were still whole, if I saw them start to crack, I’d know it was time to run. I can’t play at being friends now.”

Boyd wrote them back, though. Them and Ava too. Boyd wrote his letters longhand, and the ink always got on his fingers, and then afterwards on Raylan: that was his part of the correspondence process. He remade all that writing into love letters, Boyd said. It was enough.

He let himself get used to the holes in his memory. There weren’t a lot of people close enough to them, anyway, to ask about their history together, and when it was just the two of them, they knew instinctively which doors to leave closed.

_How long have I loved you?_

_How long have I been with you?_

_Why did we leave?_

Home was the mud you tracked wherever you tried to start over: they never made the mistake, either of them, of thinking of the house in Key West as home.

Sometimes, when Raylan couldn’t sleep, he would slip carefully from their bed and sit in the kitchen drinking Jim Beam until he went numb. Sometimes, on those nights, two boys, barely older than nineteen, would gather near the windows. They both had shadows printed underneath their eyes and coal dust on their clothes. They looked like they were holding hands until you looked close, and then you saw where their bones grew into each other. Blind white spiders crawled around their feet.

But when the sun came up and set the haint blue of the porch ablaze in all its glory, the boys always vanished. If it was only a trick, it was a good one.

On those mornings, Raylan would be late for work. He would go back to bed with Boyd and stay there long enough for memory to become meaningless. He would remind himself, his lips pressed to Boyd’s collarbone, that the cracks of the world let in the light as well as the darkness, and on those mornings, he would believe that to be true.


	14. Note

Author's note: I added this in a slightly different form as a note at the beginning of the story, as well. I'm hoping that by adding it on as a separate chapter, those of you who subscribed or otherwise watched the story might be able to help me out?

In the comments, there's some discussion of how Stephen King's novel _IT_ was probably in the back of my mind when I wrote this, as there are some similarities and echoes. John Edward Marinville, in comments, feels that more (and too much) was also borrowed from _Desperation_ (which I've read) and its companion novel _The Regulators_ (which I haven't), also by King, and while I feel that the similarities from these that I can see are tropes that are widely used by fantasy/horror in general, rather than just King, if anyone feels that I have borrowed directly from King, as opposed to the genre as a whole, please let me know, and I will change/delete/credit as appropriate, as it was not my intention to directly evoke any of these specific works. (The one exception being one homage in the very last line, which felt more like an inside joke to myself rather than to readers, since even it is significantly different and again, generalized.)

I can also cross-list this with another fandom, if necessary, if this does turn out to be, in anyone eyes', either _IT_ or another novel set in Harlan: a fusion story. Again, I didn't intend any problems or confusion. If I've crossed a line here, it was unintentional, and I'd like to be able to correct it as soon as possible. Is anyone familiar enough with the works in question to comment on this situation, and if so (or even if not), how do you feel I should address it?

Thanks for your help, and sorry about spamming your inbox, effectively, with an update that's not.


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